Chain Collapse and Counterion Condensation in Dilute Polyelectrolyte Solutions
Soft Condensed Matter
2009-10-31 v1 Statistical Mechanics
Abstract
A new quantitative theory for polyelectrolytes in salt free dilute solutions is developed. Depending on the electrostatic interaction strength, polyelectrolytes in solutions can undergo strong stretching (with polyelectrolyte dimension R_g\sim l_B^{1/3}N, where l_B is the Bjerrum length and N is the number of the chain segments) or strong compression (with R_g\sim l_B^{-1/2}N^{1/3}). A strong polymer collapse occurs as a first-order phase transition due to accompanying counterion condensation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9802292,
title = {Chain Collapse and Counterion Condensation in Dilute Polyelectrolyte Solutions},
author = {N. V. Brilliantov and D. V. Kuznetsov and R. Klein},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9802292},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
4 pages, 2 figures