Salt-induced collapse and reexpansion of highly charged flexible polyelectrolytes

Abstract

We study the salt-dependent conformations of dilute flexible polyelectrolytes in solution via computer simulations. Low concentrations of multivalent salt induce the known conformational collapse of individual polyelectrolyte chains, but as the salt concentration is increased further this is followed by a reexpansion. We explicitly demonstrate that multivalent counterions can overcompensate the bare charge of the chain in the reexpansion regime. Both the degree of reexpansion and the occurrence of overcharging sensitively depend on ion size. Our findings are relevant for a wide range of salt-induced complexation phenomena.

References in corpus (1)

• Structure and stability of self-assembled actin-lysozyme complexes in salty water

Cited by in corpus (17)

• Theory of competitive counterion adsorption on flexible polyelectrolytes : Divalent salts
• Activity induced collapse and re-expansion of rigid polymers
• Overcharging, charge inversion and reentrant condensation: Using highly-charged polyelectrolytes in tetravalent salt solutions as an example of study
• Heterogeneous morphology and dynamics of polyelectrolyte brush condensates in trivalent counterion solution
• Counterion adsorption on flexible polyelectrolytes: comparison of theories
• Role of chain stiffness on the conformation of single polyelectrolytes in salt solutions
• Electrostatic correlation induced ion condensation and charge inversion in multivalent electrolytes
• Unfolding Collapsed Polyelectrolytes in Alternating-Current Electric Fields
• On the nature of overcharging and charge inversion in electrical double layers
• Electrostatics in dissipative particle dynamics using Ewald sums with point charges
• Implementation of non-uniform FFT based Ewald summation in Dissipative Particle Dynamic method
• Ion correlation driven like-charge attraction in multivalent salt solutions
• Electrostatic Correlation Augmented Self-Consistent Field Theory and Its Application to Polyelectrolyte Brushes
• Collapse and expansion kinetics of a single polyelectrolyte chain with hydrodynamic interactions
• Interactions between polyelectrolytes mediated by ordering and orientation of multivalent non-spherical ions in salt solutions
• The explicit characterization of counterion dynamics around a flexible polyelectrolyte
• Understanding long-range opposite charge repulsion in multivalent salt solutions