Bottom-Up Construction of the Interaction between Janus Particles

While the interaction between two uniformly charged spheres─viz colloids─is well-known, the interaction between nonuniformly charged spheres such as Janus particles is not. Specifically, the Derjaguin approximation relates the potential energy between two spherical particles with the interaction energy V_pl per unit area between two planar surfaces. The formalism has been extended to obtain a quadrature expression for the screened electrostatic interaction between Janus colloids with variable relative orientations. The interaction is decomposed into three zones in the parametric space, distinguished by their azimuthal symmetry. Different specific situations are examined to estimate the contributions of these zones to the total energy. The effective potential V_pl is renormalized such that the resulting potential energy is identical with the actual one for the most preferable relative orientations between the Janus particles. The potential energy as a function of the separation distance and the mutual orientation of a pair of particles compares favorably between the analytical (but approximate) form and the rigorous point-wise computational model used earlier. Coarse-grained models of Janus particles can thus implement this potential model efficiently without loss of generality.