Importance of Varying Permittivity on the Conductivity of Polyelectrolyte Solutions

Abstract

Dissolved ions can alter the local permittivity of water, nevertheless most theories and simulations ignore this fact. We present a novel algorithm for treating spatial and temporal variations in the permittivity and use it to measure the equivalent conductivity of a salt-free polyelectrolyte solution. Our new approach quantitatively reproduces experimental results unlike simulations with a constant permittivity that even qualitatively fail to describe the data. We can relate this success to a change in the ion distribution close to the polymer due to the built-up of a permittivity gradient.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Effects of electrostatic interactions on ligand dissociation kinetics
• Limiting Spurious Flow in Simulations of Electrokinetic Phenomena
• The influence of charged-induced variations in the local permittivity on the static and dynamic properties of polyelectrolyte solutions
• Dissipative Particle Dynamics for Systems with Polar Species
• Electric field based Poisson-Boltzmann: Treating mobile charge as polarization