Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

Concentrated ionic systems can find practical applications in energystorage devices, and in living cells the density of ions is large.Classical theories developed for dilute electrolytes, however, are notvalid when the average distance between the ions becomes comparable withtheir diameters. Different experimental techniques, approximate theoriesand simulations give contradictory results for the distribution of theions and for screening of charged objects, and a commonly acceptedtheory is still to be developed.
I will very briefly present the experimental and simulation results.Next I'll discuss major differences between dilute and concentratedionic systems, and introduce the mesoscopic approach for ionic systemswith any density. In the theory, the finite size of the ions and thevariance of the local charge are taken into account.The correlationfunctions obtained within the theory will be compared with experiments.The remaining open questions will be discussed.