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A self-consistent Ornstein–Zernike jellium for highly charged colloids (microgels) in suspensions with added salt

This work discusses a jellium scheme, built within the framework of the multicomponent Ornstein–Zernike (OZ) equation, which is capable of describing the collective structure of suspensions of highly charged colloids with added salt, even in the presence of finite-size multivalent microions. This approach uses a suitable approximation to decouple the microion–microion correlations from the macroion–microion profiles, which in combination with the methodology from the dressed ion theory (DIT) gives a full account of the electrostatic effective potential among the colloids. The main advantages of the present contribution reside in its ability to manage the short-range potentials and non-linear correlations among the microions, as well as its realistic characterization of the ionic clouds surrounding each macroion. The structure factors predicted by this jellium scheme are contrasted with previously reported experimental results for microgel suspensions with monovalent salts (2019 Phys. Rev. E 100 032602), thus validating its high accuracy in these situations. The present theoretical analysis is then extended to microgel suspensions with multivalent salts, which reveals the prominent influence of the counterion valence on the makeup of the effective potentials. Although the induced differences may be difficult to identify through the mesoscopic structure, our results suggest that the microgel collapsing transition may be used to enhance these distinct effects, thus giving a feasible experimental probe for these phenomena.