Influence of surface affinity of planar walls on effective interaction between the wall and colloids

Using density functional theory, we investigate the effective interaction between a big colloid immersed in a sea of small colloids and a wall which has different affinity to the small colloids. Steele 10-4-3 potential is introduced to mimic both short-range repulsive and long-range attractive interactions between the wall and the small colloids. It is found that the surface affinity of the wall has a significant influence on the effective interaction. In the short-range repulsive case, the repulsion greatly enhances the big colloid-wall effective attraction, which sensitively depends on the concentration of small colloids, and is not sensitive to the repulsive strength. In the long-range attractive case, both the concentration of small colloids and the attractive strength have great effect on the effective interaction, and with an increase of the attractive strength, a strong repulsion may be induced when the big colloid is close to the wall. In low density limit of small colloids, the present results agree well with those of the Asakura and Oosawa(AO) approximation. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.