“…Depletion forces, polymer crowding, and phase behavior in colloid-polymer mixtures and polymer-nanoparticle composite materials have been probed by a diverse array of experimental methods, including neutron scattering [51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58], atomic force microscopy [59], total internal reflection microscopy [60], optical trapping [61][62][63], and turbidity measurements [64][65][66]. Related modeling approaches have been based on mean-field and scaling theories [5,[67][68][69][70], free-volume theories [71][72][73][74], force-balance theory [75], perturbation theory [76,77], polymer field theory [78][79][80][81][82][83][84], integral-equation theory [85][86][87], densityfunctional theory [88][89][90][91][92], adsorption theory [93][94][95]…”