| Issue |
EPL
Volume 149, Number 6, March 2025
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 67001 | |
| Number of page(s) | 7 | |
| Section | Biological and soft matter physics | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/adbb89 | |
| Published online | 17 March 2025 | |
Continuum electrostatics with capped Coulomb potential
1 Institute of Mathematical and Physical Sciences, Universidad Austral de Chile - Valdivia 5090000, Chile
2 Department of Physics, North Dakota State University - Fargo, ND 58108, USA
Received: 28 January 2025
Accepted: 28 February 2025
For ensembles of spatially extended ions, electrostatic interaction energies can be calculated more accurately using a capped Coulomb potential, which remains constant within a fixed distance and then decays inversely with distance. When this fixed distance is small, the capped Coulomb potential transitions into a composite Coulomb-Yukawa potential, widely used in modeling dense electrolytes and ionic liquids and associated with a fourth-order derivative in Poisson's equation. To go beyond the fourth order, we develop a theoretical framework for continuum electrostatics based on the capped Coulomb potential. We derive and solve a modified Poisson equation and calculate corresponding electrostatic interaction energies. Solutions of the modified Poisson equation are shown to emerge from applying a differential operator to the potential predicted by the unmodified Poisson equation. We demonstrate that the electrostatic potential satisfying the modified Poisson equation can exhibit discontinuities at interfaces.
© 2025 The author(s)
Published by the EPLA under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY). Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.