Electrostatics in Soft Matter

The ubiquitous presence of polar water in biological (and soft) matter reduces ionization barrier significantly so that most biological molecules are charged either locally or globally. For this reason, the charge interaction is among the most important long range interaction governing the behavior of these molecules. Recently, there have been intensive studies on the electrostatics of biological system in order to understand its anomalous behaviors which are originated from the inhomogeneity of the system, and hydration effect. Some examples are attraction between like charges, repulsion between opposite charges, charge inversion, charge condensation and renormalization, charged domain growth, phase separations of polymer solutions, charged lamellar stacking, self-assembly and bundling of polyelectrolytes. Conventional theoretical approaches based on the mean field theory often fail to explain these phenomena. Hierarchical structure and the mesoscopic nature are essential hurdles to understand these systems. In this talk, I will highlight novel theoretical and massive computational efforts to study electrostatics of biological systems.