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The Poisson-Boltzmann equation is often presented via a variational formulation based on the electrostatic potential. However, the functional has the defect of being non-convex. It can not be used as a local minimization principle while…
The description of a conducting medium in thermal equilibrium, such as an electrolyte solution or a plasma, involves nonlinear electrostatics, a subject rarely discussed in the standard electricity and magnetism textbooks. We consider in…
In the study of model electronic device systems where electrons are typically under confinement, a key obstacle is the need to iteratively solve the coupled Schr\"{o}dinger-Poisson (SP) equation. It is possible to bypass this obstacle by…
In biological and synthetic materials, many important processes involve charges that are present in a medium with spatially varying dielectric permittivity. To accurately understand the role of electrostatic interactions in such systems, it…
The energy functional, the governing partial differential equation(s) (PDE), and the boundary conditions need to be consistent with each other in a modeling system. In electrolyte solution study, people usually use a free energy form of an…
We study finite-difference approximations of both Poisson and Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) electrostatic energy functionals for periodic structures constrained by Gauss' law and a class of local algorithms for minimizing the finite-difference…
Electrostatics is of paramount importance to chemistry, physics, biology, and medicine. The Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) theory is a primary model for electrostatic analysis. However, it is highly challenging to compute accurate PB electrostatic…
Mobile charge in an electrolytic solution can in principle be represented as the divergence of ionic polarization. After adding explicit solvent polarization a finite volume of electrolyte can then be treated as a composite non-uniform…
A variational approach is used to develop a robust numerical procedure for solving the nonlinear Poisson-Boltzmann equation. Following Maggs et al., we construct an appropriate constrained free energy functional, such that its…
A simple technique is proposed for numerically determining equilibrium ion distribution functions belonging to free energies of the Poisson-Boltzmann type. The central idea is to perform a conventional Monte-Carlo simulation using the free…
We study the properties of convex functionals which have been proposed for the simulation of charged molecular systems within the Poisson-Boltzmann approximation. We consider the extent to which the functionals reproduce the true…
This work proposes a fast iterative method for local steric Poisson--Boltzmann (PB) theories, in which the electrostatic potential is governed by the Poisson's equation and ionic concentrations satisfy equilibrium conditions. To present the…
The accurate modeling of the dielectric properties of water is crucial for many applications in physics, computational chemistry and molecular biology. This becomes possible in the framework of nonlocal electrostatics, for which we propose…
In a continuum model of the solvation of charged molecules in an aqueous solvent, the classical Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) theory is generalized to include the solute point charges and the dielectric boundary that separates the high-dielectric…
We derive an equation capable of treating both the electrostatic and non-electrostatic interactions in the charged liquids. The equation derived is a complex version of the Poisson-Boltzmann equation, in which the non-electrostatic…
A dynamical generalisation of the nonlocal coherent-potential approximation is derived based upon the functional integral approach to the interacting electron problem. The free energy is proven to be variational with respect to the…
In this paper, we present an analytical solution to nonlocal continuum electrostatics for an arbitrary charge distribution in a spherical solute. Our approach relies on two key steps: (1) re-formulating the PDE problem using…
Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) theory is the classic approach to soft matter electrostatics which has been applied to numerous problems of physical chemistry and biophysics. Its essential limitations are the neglect of correlation effects and of…
The Poisson-Boltzmann equation (PBE) is an implicit solvent continuum model for calculating the electrostatic potential and energies of ionic solvated biomolecules. However, its numerical solution remains a significant challenge due strong…
The Poisson-Boltzmann (PB) theory is widely used to depict ionic systems. As a mean-field theory, the PB theory neglects the correlation effect in the ionic atmosphere and leads to deviations from experimental results as the concentration…