Re-entrant limits of stability of the liquid phase and the Speedy scenario in colloidal model systems

Journal article

A re-entrant gas-liquid spinodal was proposed as a possible explanation of the apparent divergence of the compressibility and specific heat off supercooling water. Such a counter-intuitive possibility, e.g., a liquid that becomes unstable to gas-like fluctuations on cooling at positive pressure, has never been observed, neither in real substances nor in off-lattice simulations. More recently, such a re-entrant scenario has been dismissed on the premise that the re-entrant spinodal would collide with the gas-liquid coexisting curve (binodal) in the pressure-temperature plane. Here we study, numerically and analytically, two previously introduced one-component patchy particle models that both show (i) a re-entrant limit of stability of the liquid phase and (ii) a re-entrant binodal, providing a neat in silico (and in charta) realization of such unconventional thermodynamic scenario.

Authors: Rovigatti, L; Bianco, V; Tavares, J; Sciortino, F

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: AIP Publishing
• Journal: Journal of Chemical Physics
• Volume: 146
• Issue: 4
• Article number: 041103
• Publication date: 2017-01-27
• Acceptance date: 2017-01-11
• DOI: 10.1063/1.4974830
• EISSN: 1089-7690
• ISSN: 0021-9606