Crystallization and reentrant melting of charged colloids in nonpolar solvents

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2015 Mar;91(3):030301. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.91.030301. Epub 2015 Mar 23.

Abstract

We explore the crystallization of charged colloidal particles in a nonpolar solvent mixture. We simultaneously charge the particles and add counterions to the solution with aerosol-OT (AOT) reverse micelles. At low AOT concentrations, the charged particles crystallize into body-centered-cubic (bcc) or face-centered-cubic (fcc) Wigner crystals; at high AOT concentrations, the increased screening drives a thus far unobserved reentrant melting transition. We observe an unexpected scaling of the data with particle size, and account for all behavior with a model that quantitatively predicts both the reentrant melting and the data collapse.