On the nature of long-range contributions to pair interactions between charged colloids in two dimensions

Abstract

We perform a detailed analysis of solutions of the inverse problem applied to experimentally measured two dimensional radial distribution functions for highly charged latex dispersions. The experiments are carried out at high colloidal densities and under low-salt conditions. At the highest densities studied, the extracted effective pair potentials contain a long-range attractive part. At the same time, we find that for the best distribution functions available the range of stability of the solutions is limited by the nearest neighbour distance between the colloidal particles. Moreover, the measured pair distribution functions can be explained by purely repulsive pair potentials contained in the stable part of the solution.