Solvation Effects in Phase Transitions in Soft Matter

TL;DR

This paper investigates how antagonistic salts influence phase transitions in polar binary mixtures, revealing mesophase formation, domain coarsening control, and pattern emergence through simulations and ion structure analysis.

Contribution

It provides detailed insights into the role of antagonistic salts in phase behavior, including simulation results and ion structure factors, advancing understanding of soft matter phase transitions.

Findings

Salt can halt or slow domain coarsening.

Stripe and droplet patterns form depending on composition.

Charged droplets with size dispersity emerge in percolated regions.

Abstract

Phase transitions in polar binary mixtures can be drastically altered even by a small amount of salt. This is because the preferential solvation strongly depends on the ambient composition. Together with a summary of our research in this problem, we present some detailed results on the role of antagonistic salt composed of hydrophilic and hydrophobic ions. These ions tend to segregate at liquid-liquid interfaces and selectively couple to water-rich and oil-rich composition fluctuations, leading to mesophase formation. In our two-dimensional simulation, the corasening of the domain structures can be stopped or slowed down, depending on the interaction parameter (or the temperature) and the salt density. We realize stripe patterns at the critical composition and droplet patterns at off-critical compositions. In the latter case, charged droplets emerge with considerable size dispersity in a percolated region. We also give the structure factors among the ions, accounting for the Coulomb interaction and the solvation interaction mediated by the composition fluctuations.