Absolute electrostatic force between two charged particles in a low dielectric solvent

Abstract

It is shown that a recently developed analytical solution to the problem of how two charged particles of a dielectric material interact with one another, gives excellent quantitative agreement with experimental measurements of the force between pairs of charged particles in a non-polar solvent. The theory shows how the presence of a dynamic surface charge distribution may moderate the repulsion between interacting particles, and allow them to accommodate more charge than would be estimated from a calculation of the bare Coulomb force. © 2012 The Royal Society of Chemistry.