Comment on "Monte Carlo study of structural ordering in charged colloids using a long-range attractive interaction" - Reply

In the Comment by Crier and Crocker (preceding paper) the authors tried to refute our criticism [Phys. Rev. E 58, 2237 (1998)] on their work [J. C. Cr ocker and D. G. Crier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 1897 (1996)] by simply fitting once again their old experimental data. Crier and Crocker claim that their pair-potential measurements on aqueous dilute suspension of charged colloid al particles confined between charged glass walls at gap of about 8 mu m pr ovide evidence for the failure of Sogami-Ise (SI) theory and demonstrate th e applicability of the Dejaguin, Landau, Vervey, and Overbeek (DLVO) theory . Crier and Crocker do not provide additional experimental proof to counter our criticism. We continue to claim here based on our conductivity and con ductometric titration measurements, which allow estimating the effective ch arge and determining the number and nature of the dissociable sites respect ively, that their measurements using not well-characterized samples cannot provide clear evidence for the failure of SI theory. With the evidences ava ilable in literature, we refute all of the Crier and Crocker comments, incl uding the effect of charged wall confinement on the measured colloidal inte ractions.