(120i) Phase Behavior of Floppy Polyhedra

Many self-assembling systems consist non-rigid constituents, such as microgels, emulsions, star polymers or polymeric coils. These systems have caught the attention of many experimentalists in recent years due to their rich phase behavior and tunable flexibility. However, most of these studies have focused on particles with spheroidal geometries. In this work, we introduce a Monte Carlo (MC) model of elastically deformable or floppy polyhedral particles. We compute the equation of state for systems composed of only floppy particles and observe a gradual shrinking in the coexistence region with increasing floppiness, in agreement with trends shown by systems of soft deformable particles such as emulsions and microgels. Additionally, our MC results show that doping a system of hard particles with a fraction of otherwise floppy particles leads to a sharp order-disorder transition at a critical floppy fraction. The onset of this transition depends on the particle stiffness and the pressure of the system.