Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
Volume 99, Issue 23, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.99.238302
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We investigate the phase behavior of athermal polymer-nanoparticle blends near a substrate. We apply a recent fluids density functional theory of Tripathi and Chapman to a simple model of the blend as a mixture of hard spheres and freely jointed hard chains, near a hard wall. We find that there is a first-order phase transition in which the nanoparticles expel the polymer from the surface to form a monolayer. The nanoparticle transition density depends on the length of the polymer and the overall bulk density of the system. The effect is due both to packing entropy effects related to size asymmetry between the components and to the polymer configurational entropy. The simplicity of the system allows us to understand the so-called entropic-push observed in experiments.
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