Correct scaling of the correlation length from a theory for concentrated electrolytes

Abstract

Self-consistent theory for concentrated electrolytes is developed. Oscillatory decay of the charge-charge correlation function with the decay length that shows perfect agreement with the experimentally discovered and so far unexplained scaling is obtained. For the density-density correlations, monotonic asymptotic decay with the decay length comparable with the decay length of the charge correlations is found. We show that the correlation lengths in concentrated electrolytes depend crucially on the local variance of the charge density.