On Condensation Driven by Electrostatic Interactions in Macroionic Solutions

Abstract

Liquid-vapour phase separation, as it normally follows from attractive interactions, is demonstrated under pure Coulomb interactions for the primitive model of macroionic solutions in the mean spherical approximation and related to observations on dilute solutions of highly charged latex particles. It is stressed that, the corresponding effective pair potential between macro-ions being of the Verwey-Overbeek repulsive type, this effective interaction does not need to be supplemented by an attractive tail in order to deal with condensation phenomena, as was done in recent work by Sogami and Ise.

Key Words:

• Charged hard spheres
• osmotic pressure
• spinodal curve