The conductivity of strong electrolytes from stochastic density functional theory

TL;DR

This paper applies stochastic density functional theory to derive electrolyte conductivity, providing a unified approach that reproduces classical results and extends to confined geometries and different Coulomb interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic density functional framework for electrolyte conductivity, offering a new derivation and potential for studying confined and lower-dimensional systems.

Findings

Derives electrolyte conductivity using stochastic density functional theory.

Reproduces classical Onsager results for bulk electrolytes.

Extends methodology to confined and lower-dimensional electrolytes.

Abstract

Stochastic density functional theory is applied to analyze the conductivity of strong two species electrolytes at arbitrary field strengths. The corresponding stochastic equations for the density of the electrolyte species are solved by linearizing them about the mean density of ionic species, yielding an effective Gaussian theory. The non-equilibrium density-density correlation functions are computed and the conductivity of the electrolyte is deduced. In the bulk, our results give a simple derivation of the results of Onsager and coworkers who used very different methods. The method developed here can also be used to study electrolytes confined in one and two dimensions and interacting via either the three dimensional Coulomb interaction or the Coulomb interaction corresponding to that dimension of space.