Suspensions of rod-like colloids and a depleting agent under confinement

We present a computer simulation study of suspensions of rod-like colloids and a depletant in confinement to a slit-pore. Mixtures of hard spherocylinders and ideal spheres were studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations in the grand canonical ensemble. By use of finite size scaling analysis we determined the critical behaviour. In order to overcome large barriers in the free energy we applied the successive umbrella sampling method (Virnau and Muller 2004 J. Chem. Phys. 120 10925). We find that, under confinement, the critical point of gas–liquid demixing shifts to higher concentrations of rods and smaller concentrations of spheres due to the formation of an orientationally ordered surface film. If the separation between the walls becomes very small, the critical point is shifted back to smaller concentrations of rods because the surface film breaks up. In particular, we present a method for determining the wetting behaviour from an analysis of the distribution of particle concentration. For large wall separations we find wetting near the critical point consistent with the Cahn argument.