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Drag Coefficient of a Rigid Spherical Particle in a Near-Critical Binary Fluid Mixture beyond the Regime of the Gaussian Model

The drag coefficient of a rigid spherical particle deviates from the Stokes law when it is put into a near-critical fluid mixture in the homogeneous phase with the critical composition. The deviation ($Δγ_{\rm d}$) is experimentally shown to depend approximately linearly on the correlation length far from the particle ($ξ_\infty$), and is suggested to be caused by the preferential attraction between one component and the particle surface. In contrast, the dependence was shown to be much steeper in the previous theoretical studies based on the Gaussian free-energy density. In the vicinity of the particle, especially when the adsorption of the preferred component makes the composition strongly off-critical, the correlation length becomes very small as compared with $ξ_\infty$. This spacial inhomogeneity, not considered in the previous theoretical studies, can influence the dependence of $Δγ_{\rm d}$ on $ξ_\infty$. To examine this possibility, we here apply the local renormalized functional theory, which was previously proposed to explain the interaction of walls immersed in a (near-)critical binary fluid mixture, describing the preferential attraction in terms of the surface field. The free-energy density in this theory, coarse-grained up to the local correlation length, has much complicated dependence on the order parameter, as compared with the Gaussian free-energy density. Still, a concise expression of the drag coefficient, which was derived in one of the previous theoretical studies, turns out to be available in the present formulation. We show that, as $ξ_{\infty}$ becomes larger, the dependence of $Δγ_{\rm d}$ on $ξ_\infty$ becomes distinctly gradual and close to the linear dependence.