Hypothesis

A detailed understanding of the influence of electrolytes on the conformation of polyelectrolyte chains is an important goal made challenging by the strong coupling between electrostatic interactions and chain conformation. This challenge is particularly evident at moderate to high salt concentrations where mean-field theories of electrolytes are no longer applicable and are therefore unable to predict the interactions between neutral or like charged surfaces that leads to re-entrant swelling of DNA and other polyelectrolytes at high salt concentrations. Recent developments arising from studies of surface forces in ionic liquids that have been extended to include a wide variety of monovalent electrolytes reveal a hitherto unknown increase in the electrostatic decay length at high electrolyte concentrations. We hypothesise that the re-entrant behaviour of polyelectrolytes is driven by an increasing electrostatic decay length with increasing electrolyte concentration.

Experiments

We survey numerous experiments in the literature on re-entrant swelling and calculate the effect of ion pairing on the electrostatic decay length in concentrated electrolytes.

Findings

Re-entrant solubility is driven by an increasing electrostatic decay length at high salt concentrations and is universal across all polyelectrolytes.

中文翻译：

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高盐浓度下静电衰变长度的增加会导致聚电解质的凹角膨胀和再溶解。

假设

对电解质对聚电解质链构象的影响的详细理解是一个重要的目标，由于静电相互作用和链构象之间的强耦合而使该目标具有挑战性。在中等至高盐浓度下，电解质的平均场理论不再适用，这一挑战尤为明显，因此无法预测中性或类似带电表面之间的相互作用，从而导致DNA和其他聚电解质在高浓度下再次进入溶胀状态。盐浓度。离子液体表面力研究的最新进展已经扩展到包括各种单价电解质，这揭示了在高电解质浓度下静电衰减长度的前所未有的增加。

实验

我们调查了文献中关于折返溶胀的大量实验，并计算了离子对对浓电解质中静电衰减长度的影响。

发现

在高盐浓度下增加的静电衰减长度可驱动凹角溶解度，并且在所有聚电解质中通用。