Many-body depletion forces of colloids in a polydisperse polymer dispersant in the long-chain limit
We study a system of spherical non-adsorbing particles immersed in a polydisperse polymer fluid. We derive an analytic expression for the many-body depletion interactions between the colloidal particles in the limit of very long chains. We argue that this expression is essentially exact for long chains and justify this using explicit simulations. In this way we are able to elucidate the profound e