title: Density-induced reentrant melting of colloidal Wigner crystals.
abstract: Electrostatic repulsions can drive crystallization in many-particle systems. For charged colloidal systems, the phase boundaries as well as crystal structure are highly tunable by experimental parameters such as salt concentration and pH. By using projections of the colloid-ion mixture to a system of (soft) repulsive spheres and the one-component plasma (OCP), we study the hitherto unexplained experimentally observed reentrant melting of electrostatically repelling colloids upon increasing the colloid density. Our study shows that the surface chemistry should involve a competition between adsorption of cations and anions to explain the observed density-induced reentrant melting.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, Center for Extreme Matter and Emergent Phenomena, Utrecht University, Leuvenlaan 4, 3584 CE Utrecht, The Netherlands. j.c.everts@uu.nl.
authors.forename: J C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Everts
authors.affiliation: Division of Physical Chemistry, Lund University, Lund SE-221 00, Sweden.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Boon
authors.affiliation: Institute for Theoretical Physics, Center for Extreme Matter and Emergent Phenomena, Utrecht University, Leuvenlaan 4, 3584 CE Utrecht, The Netherlands. j.c.everts@uu.nl.
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: van Roij