Phase behavior of Ising mixtures

We present phase diagrams that were calculated both in mean-field theory and via Monte Carlo (MC) simulations for binary mixtures of a ferromagnetic Ising fluid and a nonmagnetic fluid (Ising mixtures) in the absence of an external field. We look at both the simple ideal Ising mixture, consisting of an ideal Ising fluid and a hard-sphere fluid, as well as at the general case with one component being a nonideal Ising fluid and the other a van der Waals fluid. It is shown that the mean-field phase diagram of the ideal Ising mixture in the limit of infinite pressure is identical to that of the Blume-Capel model for 3He-4He mixtures. The MC phase diagrams were obtained using the Gibbs ensemble, the cumulant intersection technique, and the multi-histogram re-weighting method, adapted to the semi-grand ensemble. The results are qualitatively compared with mean-field theory, and both types of tri-critical lines occurring there are verified in the computer simulations.