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Dielectric effects in the self-assembly of binary colloidal aggregates

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 نشر من قبل Erik Luijten
 تاريخ النشر 2014
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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Electrostatic interactions play an important role in numerous self-assembly phenomena, including colloidal aggregation. Although colloids typically have a dielectric constant that differs from the surrounding solvent, the effective interactions that arise from inhomogeneous polarization charge distributions are generally neglected in theoretical and computational studies. We introduce an efficient technique to resolve polarization charges in dynamical dielectric geometries, and demonstrate that dielectric effects emph{qualitatively} alter the predicted self-assembled structures, with surprising colloidal strings arising from many-body effects.



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