Liquid-vapour phase behaviour of a polydisperse Lennard-Jones fluid

We describe a simulation study of the liquid-vapour phase behaviour of a model polydisperse fluid. Particle interactions are given by a Lennard-Jones potential in which polydispersity features both in the particle sizes and the amplitude of their interactions. We address the computational problem of accurately locating the cloud curve for such a system using Monte Carlo simulations within the grand canonical ensemble. The strongly nonlinear variation of the fractional volumes of the phases across the coexistence region precludes naive extrapolation to determine the cloud point density. Instead we propose an improved estimator for the cloud point location and use scaling arguments to predicts its finite-size behaviour. Excellent agreement is found with the simulation results. Application of the method reveals that the measured cloud curve is highly sensitive to the presence of large particles, even when they are extremely rare. This finding is expected to have implications for the reproducibility of experimentally measured phase diagrams in colloids and polymers