Coupling Effects of Depletion Interactions in Colloidal Suspensions

With the aid of Monte Carlo simulations and acceptance ratio method, the depletion interactions of the three-sphere system are studied in this paper, and the numerical results show that the depletion interactions in the three-sphere system are larger than that of the corresponding two-sphere system, i.e., the depletion interaction of the three-sphere system are coupled with each other. Furthermore, we find that the mechanisms of the coupling effect and the effect on depletion force from the geometry factor are the same. In addition, the numerical results also show that this coupling effect will be affected by both the volume fraction and separation of three-sphere system.