Electrostatic Interactions of Asymmetrically Charged Membranes

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical theory to predict the nature and range of electrostatic interactions between oppositely charged membranes, considering salt concentration and surface charge densities, with implications for surface force experiments.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analytical framework for the electrostatic interactions of asymmetrically charged membranes, including crossover conditions and scaling regimes.

Findings

Attractive pressure can be long-ranged at low salt and high surface charges.

Crossover between attraction and repulsion depends on salt concentration and charge densities.

Predictions align with surface force experimental observations.

Abstract

We predict the nature (attractive or repulsive) and range (exponentially screened or long-range power law) of the electrostatic interactions of oppositely charged and planar plates as a function of the salt concentration and surface charge densities (whose absolute magnitudes are not necessarily equal). An analytical expression for the crossover between attractive and repulsive pressure is obtained as a function of the salt concentration. This condition reduces to the high-salt limit of Parsegian and Gingell where the interaction is exponentially screened and to the zero salt limit of Lau and Pincus in which the important length scales are the inter-plate separation and the Gouy-Chapman length. In the regime of low salt and high surface charges we predict - for any ratio of the charges on the surfaces - that the attractive pressure is long-ranged as a function of the spacing. The attractive pressure is related to the decrease in counter-ion concentration as the inter-plate distance is decreased. Our theory predicts several scaling regimes with different scaling expressions for the pressure as function of salinity and surface charge densities. The pressure predictions can be related to surface force experiments of oppositely charged surfaces that are prepared by coating one of the mica surfaces with an oppositely charged polyelectrolyte.