On the stability of polydisperse colloidal crystals

2014 The recently developed density functional theory of freezing is applied to an investigation of the mechanical and thermodynamic stability of polydisperse colloidal crystals. The colloidal particles are modelled by hard spheres with a continuous distribution p(03C3) of additive diameters. It is shown that such solid solutions cease to be stable beyond a critical degree of polydispersity, which depends somewhat on the shape of p(03C3), but is always of the order of 20 %. The problem of determining the fluid-solid coexistence curve is also briefly examined J. Physique 47 (1986) 1547-1553 SEPTEMBRE 1986,