engleski

Fluctuation and Microheterogeneity in Aqueous Mixtures

Fluctuations play an important role in statistical assemblies, the most known being that to critical fluctuations in phase transitions. Under certain circumstances, however, and for particular types of interactions, these fluctuations can materialize into "particles". The simplest example is that of the micelle, which is formed in a ternary mixture of oil-water-surfactant, which is an arrested phase transition. It turns out that even simple binary aqueous mixtures can be the siege of such particle formations, even though the innner fluctuations does not often allow to distinguish them. This particular situations is akin to the Lifshitz state, which is more often met in condensed matter and high energy physics when particles emerge from vacuum fluctuations. Since the microscopic physics of aqueous mixtures is well known, we can study Lifshitz states in an entirely classical background. We will explain our strategy of rethinking aqueous mixtures along these lines and particular show how this approach explains many of the difficulties previously met by several authors in computing the so called-Kirkwood-Buff integrals from computer simulation results.

fluctuation; microheterogeneity; Kirkwood-Buff Integrals

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