Issue 7, 2016

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.

Graphical abstract: Density-induced reentrant melting of colloidal Wigner crystals

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
23 Dec 2015
Accepted
20 Jan 2016
First published
20 Jan 2016

Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2016,18, 5211-5218

Density-induced reentrant melting of colloidal Wigner crystals

J. C. Everts, N. Boon and R. van Roij, Phys. Chem. Chem. Phys., 2016, 18, 5211 DOI: 10.1039/C5CP07943H

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