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We present a mechanism for the stabilization of colloids in liquid mixtures without use of surfactants or polymers. When a suitable salt is added to a solvent mixture, the coupling of the colloid's surface chemistry and the preferential…
Ionic solids and melts are compounds in which the interactions are dominated by electrostatic effects. However, the polarization of the ions also plays an important role in many respects as has been clarified in recent years thanks to the…
We consider a system composed of a monodisperse charge-stabilized colloidal suspension in the presence of monovalent salt, separated from the pure electrolyte by a semipermeable membrane, which allows the crossing of solvent, counterions,…
Phase transitions in polar binary mixtures can be drastically altered even by a small amount of salt. This is because the preferential solvation strongly depends on the ambient composition. Together with a summary of our research in this…
Interactions between quasiparticles are of fundamental importance and ultimately determine the macroscopic properties of quantum matter. A famous example is the phenomenon of superconductivity, which arises from attractive electron-electron…
We study solitons in a zig-zag lattice of magnetic dipoles. The lattice comprises two sublattices of parallel chains with magnetic dipoles at their vertices. Due to orthogonal easy planes of rotation for dipoles belonging to different…
We examine an electric double layer containing an antagonistic salt in an aqueous mixture, where the cations are small and hydrophilic but the anions are large and hydrophobic. In this situation, a strong coupling arises between the charge…
Many key industrial processes, from electricity production, conversion and storage to electrocatalysis or electrochemistry in general, rely on physical mechanisms occurring at the interface between a metallic electrode and an electrolyte…
The electrostatic double layer force is key to determining the stability and self-assembly of charged colloids and many other soft matter systems. Fully understanding the attractive force between two like-charged surfaces remains a great…
Microscopy observations show that suspensions of synthetic and natural nano-layered smectite clay particles submitted to a strong external electric field undergo a fast and extended structuring. This structuring results from the interaction…
It is well established that when multivalent counterions or salts are added to a solution of highly-charged polyelectrolytes (PEs), correlation effects can cause charge inversion of the PE, leading to electrophoretic mobility (EM) reversal.…
We investigate electric-field effects in dilute electrolytes with nonlinear polarization. As a first example of such systems, we add a dipolar component with a relatively large dipole moment $\mu_0$ to an aqueous electrolyte. As a second…
Mean-field theory is used to model polyelectrolyte adsorption and the possibility of overcompensation of charged surfaces. For charged surfaces that are also chemically attractive, the overcharging is large in high salt conditions,…
We theoretically investigate electrostatic properties between two charged surfaces with a grafted polyelectrolyte layer in an aqueous electrolyte solution by using the Poisson-Boltzmann approach accounting for ion partitioning. In order to…
Counterion distribution around an isolated flexible polyelectrolyte in the presence of a divalent salt is evaluated using the adsorption model [M. Muthukumar, J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 120}, 9343 (2004)] that considers Bjerrum length, salt…
We study the distribution of multivalent counterions next to a dielectric slab, bearing a quenched, random distribution of charges on one of its solution interfaces, with a given mean and variance, both in the absence and in the presence of…
The forces between colloidal particles at a decane-water interface, in the presence of low concentrations of a monovalent salt (NaCl) and of the surfactant sodium dodecylsulfate (SDS) in the aqueous subphase, have been studied using laser…
The charge inversion phenomenon is studied by molecular dynamics simulations, focusing on size and valence asymmetric salts, and a threshold of surface charge density for charge inversion. The charge inversion criteria by the…
We characterize the role of charge correlations in the adsorption of a short, rod-like anionic polyelectrolyte onto a similarly charged membrane. Our theory reveals two different mechanisms driving the like-charge polyelectrolyte-membrane…
Quantum chemical calculations have been employed to investigate the solvation of lithium cations in ethylene carbonate/propylene carbonate and propylene carbonate/dimethyl carbonate mixed electrolytes. The impact of the presence of the…