Many interacting particles in solution. I. Screening-ranged expansions of electrostatic potential and energy

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical framework for many-body electrostatics in electrolyte solutions, providing explicit series expansions that improve modeling of complex charged particle interactions and screening effects.

Contribution

It introduces screening-ranged expansions for electrostatic potential and energy in many-particle systems, extending classical methods within a rigorous spectral analysis framework.

Findings

Provides explicit series expansions for potentials and energies

Enables modeling of heterogeneously charged systems like Janus particles

Generalizes two-body results to many-body scenarios

Abstract

We present an analytical many-body formalism for systems of spherical particles carrying arbitrary free charge distributions and interacting in a polarizable electrolyte solution, that we model within the linearized Poisson--Boltzmann framework. Building on the detailed spectral analysis of the associated nonstandard Neumann--Poincar\'e-type operators developed in our companion study arXiv:2512.08684, we construct exact explicit expansions of the electrostatic potential and energy in ascending orders of Debye screening thereby obtaining systematic "screening-ranged" series for potentials and energies. These screening-ranged expansions provide a unified and tractable description of many-body electrostatics. We demonstrate the versatility of the approach by showing how it generalizes and improves upon both classical and modern methods, enabling rigorous treatment of heterogeneously charged systems (such as Janus particles) and accurate modeling of higher-order phenomena (such as asymmetric dielectric screening, opposite-charge repulsion, like-charge attraction) as well as yielding many-body generalizations to analytical explicit results previously known only in the two-body setting.