Connectivity Percolation in Suspensions of Attractive Square-Well Spherocylinders

TL;DR

This study investigates how attractive square-well spherocylinders undergo connectivity percolation, revealing that attraction influences the aspect ratio scaling and the importance of virial corrections compared to hard particles.

Contribution

It demonstrates that attractive interactions cause the percolation threshold to reach inverse aspect ratio scaling at lower values than in hard spherocylinders, highlighting the role of virial corrections.

Findings

Percolation threshold scales with inverse aspect ratio at lower aspect ratios due to attraction.

Virial corrections are less significant for attractive potentials than for hard particles.

Attractive spherocylinders reach the scaling regime more readily than hard ones.

Abstract

We have studied the connectivity percolation transition in suspensions of attractive square-well spherocylinders by means of Monte Carlo simulation and connectednes percolation theory. In the 1980s the percolation threshold of slender fibres has been predicted to scale as the fibres' inverse aspect ratio (Phys.~Rev.~B {\bf 30}, 3933 (1984)). The main finding of our study is that the attractive spherocylinder system reaches this inverse scaling regime at much lower aspect ratios than found in suspensions of hard spherocylinders. We explain this difference by showing that third virial corrections of the pair connectedness functions, which are responsible for the deviation from the scaling regime, are less important for attractive potentials than for hard particles.