Comment on ``Adsorption of Polyelectrolyte onto a Colloid of Opposite Charge''
Soft Condensed Matter
2009-10-31 v2 Materials Science
Statistical Mechanics
Abstract
In a recent Letter, Gurovitch and Sens studied the adsorption of a weakly charged polyelectrolyte chain onto an oppositely charged colloidal particle. By using a variational technique they found that the colloidal particle can adsorb a polymer of higher charge than its own, and thus be ``overcharged.'' I argue that the observed overcharging by a factor of 16/5 is indeed an artifact of the approximations involved in the study. Moreover, I show that the existence of overcharging depends crucially on the choice of the trial wave function, contrary to their claim.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/9901152,
title = {Comment on ``Adsorption of Polyelectrolyte onto a Colloid of Opposite Charge''},
author = {Ramin Golestanian},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/9901152},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
A comment on: E. Gurovitch and P. Sens, Phys. Rev. Lett. 82, 339 (1999)