Liquid-vapor transition and critical behavior of the ultrasoft restricted primitive model of polyelectrolytes: A Monte Carlo study

Mean-field theory of active electrolytes: Dynamic adsorption and overscreening

We investigate active electrolytes within the mean-field level of description. The focus is on how the double-layer structure of passive, thermalized charges is affected by active dynamics of constituting ions. One feature of active dynamics is that particles adhere to hard surfaces, regardless of chemical properties of a surface and specifically in complete absence of any chemisorption or physisorption. To carry out the mean-field analysis of the system that is out of equilibrium, we develop the "mean-field simulation" technique, where the simulated system consists of charged parallel sheets moving on a line and obeying active dynamics, with the interaction strength rescaled by the number of sheets. The mean-field limit becomes exact in the limit of an infinite number of movable sheets.

Two-component Gaussian core model: Strong-coupling limit, Bjerrum pairs, and gas-liquid phase transition

In the present work, we investigate a gas-liquid transition in a two-component Gaussian core model, where particles of the same species repel and those of different species attract. Unlike a similar transition in a one-component system with particles having attractive interactions at long separations and repulsive interactions at short separations, a transition in the two-component system is not driven solely by interactions but by a specific feature of the interactions, the correlations. This leads to extremely low critical temperature, as correlations are dominant in the strong-coupling limit. By carrying out various approximations based on standard liquid-state methods, we show that a gas-liquid transition of the two-component system poses a challenging theoretical problem.