Structure of electrolyte solutions at non-uniformly charged surfaces on a variety of length scales

Abstract

The structures of dilute electrolyte solutions close to non-uniformly charged planar substrates are systematically studied within the entire spectrum of microscopic to macroscopic length scales by means of a unified classical density functional theory (DFT) approach. This is in contrast to previous investigations, which are applicable either to short or to long length scales. It turns out that interactions with microscopic ranges, e.g., due to the hard cores of the fluid molecules and ions, have negligible influence on the formation of non-uniform lateral structures of the electrolyte solutions. This partly justifies the Debye-H\"uckel approximation schemes applied in previous studies of that system. In general, a coupling between the lateral and the normal fluid structures leads to the phenomenology that, upon increasing the distance from the substrate, less details of the lateral non-uniformities contribute to the fluid structure, such that ultimately only large-scale surface features remain relevant. It can be expected that this picture also applies to other fluids characterized by several length scales.