Electrostatics of Patchy Surfaces

Abstract

In the study of colloidal, biological and electrochemical systems, it is customary to treat surfaces, macromolecules and electrodes as homogeneously charged. This simplified approach is proven successful in most cases, but fails to describe a wide range of heterogeneously charged surfaces commonly used in experiments. For example, recent experiments have revealed a long-range attraction between overall neutral surfaces, locally charged in a mosaic-like structure of positively and negatively charged domains ("patches"). Here we review experimental and theoretical studies addressing the stability of heterogeneously charged surfaces, their ionic strength in solution, and the interaction between two such surfaces. We focus on electrostatics, and highlight the important new physical parameters appearing in the heterogeneous case, such as the largest patch size and inter-surface charge correlations

13 pages, 9 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Distribution of counterions near discretely charged planes and rods
• Charged Particles on Surfaces: Coexistence of Dilute Phases and Periodic Structures on Membranes
• Asymmetric Coulomb fluids at randomly charged dielectric interfaces: Anti-fragility, overcharging and charge inversion
• Competing interactions in two dimensional Coulomb systems: Surface charge heterogeneities in co-assembled cationic-anionic incompatible mixtures
• Electrostatic attraction between cationic-anionic assemblies with surface compositional heterogeneities
• Electrostatic Attraction between Overall Neutral Surfaces

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Like-Charge Attraction between Metal Nanoparticles in a 1:1 Electrolyte Solution
• Surfactant Mediated Particle Aggregation in Nonpolar Solvent
• Spherical structure factor and classification of hyperuniformity on the sphere
• Osmotic pressure between arbitrarily charged surfaces: a revisited approach
• Theoretical investigation of a polarizable colloid in the salt medium
• Reactive Monte Carlo Simulations for Charge Regulation of Colloidal Particles
• From discrete to continuous description of spherical surface charge distributions
• Anisotropic DLVO-like interaction for charge patchiness in colloids and proteins
• Electrolyte solutions at heterogeneously charged substrates
• Heterogeneous surface charge confining an electrolyte solution
• Designing Surface Charge Patterns for Shape Control of Deformable Nanoparticles
• Rodlike counterions at heterogeneously charged surfaces
• Structure of electrolyte solutions at non-uniformly charged surfaces on a variety of length scales