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

Author(s)
Lorenzo Rovigatti, Valentino Bianco, Jose Maria Tavares, Francesco Sciortino
Abstract

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 reentrant 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.

Organisation(s)
Computational and Soft Matter Physics
External organisation(s)
University of Oxford, Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa, Universidade de Lisboa, Sapienza University of Rome, Institute of Genetics and Biophysics "Adriano Buzzati-Traverso", CNR
Journal
Journal of Chemical Physics
Volume
146
No. of pages
5
ISSN
0021-9606
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4974830
Publication date
01-2017
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103015 Condensed matter
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
General Physics and Astronomy, Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/8b222e84-37ae-463e-a023-ffe58c4c6a71