English

Counterion-mediated Electrostatic Interactions between Helical Molecules

Soft Condensed Matter 2011-07-21 v1 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We study the interaction of two cylinders with helical charge distribution mediated by neutralizing counterions, by analyzing the separation as well as the azimuthal angle dependence of the interaction force in the weak and strong coupling limit. While the azimuthal dependence of the interaction in the weak coupling limit is overall small and mostly negligible, the strong coupling limit leads to qualitatively new features of the interaction, among others also to an orientationally dependent optimal configuration that is driven by angular dependence of the correlation attraction. We investigate the properties of this azimuthal ordering in detail and compare it to existing results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0807.1586,
  title  = {Counterion-mediated Electrostatic Interactions between Helical Molecules},
  author = {M. Kanduc and J. Dobnikar and R. Podgornik},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.1586},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

11 pages, 12 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-21T10:59:09.833Z