Critical exponents of colloid particles in bulk and confinement

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to analyze the percolation behavior and critical exponents of colloid particles in bulk and confined geometries, revealing dimensional crossover effects.

Contribution

It provides new insights into how confinement influences percolation thresholds and critical exponents in colloid systems, bridging 3D and 2D behaviors.

Findings

Percolation threshold varies non-monotonically with slit-pore width.

Critical exponents in 3D match random percolation theory.

Narrow slit-pores exhibit 2D percolation exponents.

Abstract

Using grand canonical Monte Carlo simulations, we investigate the percolation behavior of a square well fluid with an ultra-short range of attraction in three dimension (3D) and in confined geometry. The latter is defined through two parallel and structureless walls (slit-pore). We focus on temperatures above the critical temperature of the (metastable) condensation transition of the 3D system. Investigating a broad range of systems sizes, we first determine the percolation thresholds, i. e., the critical packing fraction for percolation $\eta_{c}$. For the slit-pore systems, $\eta_{c}$ is found to vary with the wall separation $L_{z}$ in a continuous but non-monotonic way, $\eta_{c}(L_{z}\rightarrow\infty)=\eta_{c}^{\text{3D}}$. We also report results for critical exponents of the percolation transition, specifically, the exponent $\nu$ of the correlation length $\xi$ and the two fisher exponents $\tau$ and $\sigma$ of the cluster-size distribution. These exponents are obtained from a finite-size analysis involving the cluster-size distribution and the radii of gyration distribution at the percolation threshold. Within the accuracy of our simulations, the values of the critical exponents of our 3D system are comparable to those of 3D random percolation theory. For narrow slit-pores, the estimated exponents are found to be close to those obtained from the random percolation theory in two dimensions.