ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses inhomogeneous simple fluids near or between planar walls, including hard sphere fluids, atomic fluids, and simple electrolytes. It deals with a comprehensive treatment of electrolytes in contact with charged surfaces, so-called diffuse electric double-layer systems. Ion-ion correlation effects in double layers are just one example of consequences of correlations between fluid particles in inhomogeneous system. An electric double-layer consists of a layer of positive charge and one of negative charge separated in space. The chapter investigates some significant effects of ion-ion correlations on the structure of electric double-layers at planar walls. Ions and other particles in electrolyte systems have in reality other types of interactions in addition to the electrostatic and repulsive short-range ones. This is an important feature since it gives an element that is often crucial in applications, namely the fact that simple anions and cations differ by considerably more than their sizes and charges.
