Density-induced reentrant melting of colloidal Wigner crystals

Abstract

Electrostatic repulsions can drive crystallization in many-particle systems. For charged colloidal systems, the phase boundaries as well as crystal structure are highly tunable by experimental parameters such as salt concentration and pH. By using projections of the colloid-ion mixture to a system of (soft) repulsive spheres and the one-component plasma (OCP), we study the hitherto unexplained experimentally observed reentrant melting of electrostatically repelling colloids upon increasing the colloid density. Our study shows that the surface chemistry should involve a competition between adsorption of cations and anions to explain the observed density-induced reentrant melting.

9 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (3)

• Many-Body Electrostatic Forces Between Colloidal Particles at Vanishing Ionic Strength
• Effective charges and virial pressure of concentrated macroion solutions
• Low-density crystals in charged colloids : Comparison with Yukawa theory

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Charge Regulating Macro-ions in Salt Solutions: Screening Properties and Electrostatic Interactions
• Complex electric double layers in charged topological colloids
• Charge regulation of nonpolar colloids
• Confinement effects on the properties of Janus dimers
• Field-driven dynamical demixing of binary mixtures
• Alternating strings and clusters in suspensions of charged colloids
• Screened Coulomb interactions of general macroions with nonzero particle volume
• Surface Charge Relaxation Controls the Lifetime of Out-of-Equilibrium Colloidal Crystals
• Unveiling Crystalline Order from Glassy Behavior of Charged Rods at Very Low Salt Concentrations