Adsorption of charged particles on an oppositely charged surface: Oscillating inversion of charge - art. no. 041407

Adsorption of multivalent counterions on the charged surface of a macroion is known to lead to inversion of the macroion charge due to the strong late ral correlations of counterions. We consider a nontrivial role of the exclu ded volume of counterions on this effect. It is shown analytically that whe n the bare charge of the macroion increases, its net charge including the a dsorbed counterions oscillates with the number of their layers. Charge inve rsion vanishes every time the top layer of counterions is completely full a nd becomes incompressible. These oscillations of charge inversion are confi rmed by Monte Carlo simulations. Another version of this phenomenon is stud ied for a metallic electrode screened by multivalent counterions when the p otential of the electrode is controlled instead of its charge. In this case , oscillations of the compressibility and charge inversion lead to oscillat ions of capacitance of this electrode with the number of adsorbed layers of multivalent counterions.