Electric Fields Near Undulating Dielectric Membranes

Abstract

Dielectric interfaces are crucial to the behavior of charged membranes, from graphene to synthetic and biological lipid bilayers. Understanding electrolyte behavior near these interfaces remains a challenge, especially in the case of rough dielectric surfaces. A lack of analytical solutions consigns this problem to numerical treatments. We report an analytic method for determining electrostatic potentials near curved dielectric membranes in a two-dimensional periodic 'slab' geometry using a periodic summation of Green's functions. This method is amenable to simulating arbitrary groups of charges near surfaces with two-dimensional deformations. We concentrate on one-dimensional undulations. We show that increasing membrane undulation increases the asymmetry of interfacial charge distributions due to preferential ionic repulsion from troughs. In the limit of thick membranes we recover results mimicking those for electrolytes near a single interface. Our work demonstrates that rough surfaces generate charge patterns in electrolytes of charged molecules or mixed-valence ions.

Main article: 25 pages, 6 figures; Supplementary Material: 5 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (4)

• The electric double layer has a life of its own
• Simulations of Coulomb systems with slab geometry using an efficient 3d Ewald summation method
• Simulations of Coulomb systems confined by polarizable surfaces using periodic Green functions
• Simulations of ionic liquids confined by metal electrodes using periodic Green functions

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