Dynamics of a suspension of interacting yolk-shell particles
In this work we study the self-diusion properties of a liquid of hollow spherical particles (shells) bearing a smaller solid sphere in their interior (yolks). We model this system using purely repulsive hard-body interactions between all (shell and yolk) particles, but assume the presence of a background ideal solvent such that all the particles execute free Brownian motion between collisions, characterized by short-time self-diusion coecients D0 s for the shells and D0 y for the yolks. Using a softened version of these interparticle potentials we perform Brownian dynamics simulations to determine the mean squared displacement and intermediate scattering function of the yolk-shell complex. These results can be understood in terms of a set of eective Langevin equations for the N interacting shell particles, pre-averaged over the yolks' degrees of freedom, from which an approximate self-consistent description of the simulated self-diusion properties can be derived. Here we compare the theoretical and simulated results between them, and with the results for the same system in the absence of yolks. We nd that the yolks, which have no eect on the shell-shell static structure, in uence the dynamic properties in a predictable manner, fully captured by the theory.