Computer simulations of charge and steric stabilised colloidal suspensions

Computer simulations of colloidal suspensions are prohibited by slow equilibration as very different length and time scales are involved for the various species. This is the reason that most simulations involve some degree of coarse-graining, whereby the degrees of freedom of the microscopic particles are traced out, and the mesoscopic particles interact with an effective potential, resulting in a coarse-grained, effective one-component description of the suspension. The focus of this paper is on recent simulation work of charge and steric stabilised colloidal suspensions. We discuss both direct simulations of the true colloidal mixture and coarse-grained approaches of the suspension involving effective interactions for the colloids. 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.