Freezing of Colloidal Crystals

Abstract

We reformulate the Kirkwood-Ramakrishnan-Yussouff theory of freezing into the standard mean field structure of phase transition theory. This approach is then applied to the order-disorder transition in colloidal crystals, where one is dealing with purely repulsive electrostatic interactions. The results are shown to be: 1) roughly consistent with the form of the Lineman criterion; 2) consistent with the Alexander-McTague condition for freezing into a bcc structure; 3) in close quantitative agreement with recent molecular dynamics calculations.

Key Words:

• Screened Coulomb interaction
• mean field theory.