Nonmonotonic electrophoretic mobility of rodlike polyelectrolytes by multivalent coions in added salt

Loading...
Thumbnail Image

Access rights

openAccess

URL

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

Date

2024-01-11

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Language

en

Pages

6

Series

Physical Review E, Volume 109

Abstract

It is well established that when multivalent counterions or salts are added to a solution of highly charged polyelectrolytes (PEs), correlation effects can cause charge inversion of the PE, leading to electrophoretic mobility (EM) reversal. In this work, we use coarse-grained molecular-dynamics simulations to unravel the less understood effect of coion valency on EM reversal for rigid DNA-like PEs. We find that EM reversal induced by multivalent counterions is suppressed with increasing coion valency in the salt added and eventually vanishes. Further, we find that EM is enhanced at fixed low salt concentrations for salts with monovalent counterions when multivalent coions with increasing valency are introduced. However, increasing the salt concentration causes a crossover that leads to EM reversal which is enhanced by increasing coion valency at high salt concentration. Remarkably, this multivalent coion-induced EM reversal persists even for low values of PE linear charge densities where multivalent counterions alone cannot induce EM reversal. These results facilitate tuning PE-PE interactions and self-assembly with both coion and counterion valencies.

Description

Keywords

Other note

Citation

Vahid, H, Scacchi, A, Sammalkorpi, M & Ala-Nissila, T 2024, ' Nonmonotonic electrophoretic mobility of rodlike polyelectrolytes by multivalent coions in added salt ', Physical Review E, vol. 109, no. 1, 014501 . https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.109.014501