Many-body effects in a binary nano-particle mixture dispersed in ideal polymer solutions
A new mean-field theory is developed to treat a binary mixture of nanoparticles imbedded in a polydisperse polymer solution. The theory is based on a many-body polymer-mediated potential of mean force (PMF) between the particles and remains accurate even in the protein regime, where the particles' diameters cannot necessarily be considered large compared to the polymer radius of gyration. As imple