ABSTRACT
Study of charged surfaces in electrolyte solutions is of fundamental
importance, as these can model lamellar liquid crystals, clays,
biologicalmembranes, electrodes, and so on. Interesting phenomena
such as like-charge attraction between similarly charged surfaces
have been observed in the presence of multivalent counteri-
ons [Guldbrand et al. (1984); Pellenq et al. (1997); Levin (2002)]. There has been a great theoretical [Engstrom and Wennerstrom
(1978); Kjellander and Mitchell (1997); Netz (2001); Moreira and
Netz (2001); Lau and Pincus (2002); Jho et al. (2007); Abrashkin et al. (2007); Jho et al. (2008); Hatlo and Lue (2009, 2010); Samaj and Trizac (2011a,b)], simulational [Guldbrand et al. (1984); Pellenq et al. (1997); Moreira and Netz (2002); Wang and Ma (2012)], and experimental [Duval et al. (2004)] effort to clarifying the behavior
of double layers near charged surfaces. In many approaches, the
theories assume that the entire system is composed of the same
dielectric material. This, however, is not very realistic, as clays,
colloidal particles, and hydrocarbon membranes have dielectric
constant significantly smaller than that of the surrounding aqueous
medium. The dielectric discontinuity across the interface results in
polarization effects [Jho et al. (2007, 2008); Hatlo and Lue (2009, 2010); dos Santos et al. (2011); Lue and Linse (2011); Wang and Ma (2012); Gan et al. (2012)], which can significantly affect the ionic distribution near the surface. In the current chapter, we present
a simple theoretical approach that allows us to accurately predict
the counterion distribution near a charged wall, which separates
two environments with different dielectric constants. We consider
separately the weak and the strong coupling regimes. Monte Carlo
(MC) simulations are also performed in order to test our theoretical
predictions.
