Equivalence between particles and fields: A general statistical mechanics theory for short and long range many‐body forces

Abstract

While in vacuum fundamental and dispersion inter‐molecular forces can be in principle of infinite range, in the bulk, however, they are of rather short‐range, typically between a few angstroms to a few hundreds of angstroms. Yet colloidal particles, nano‐particles, and supramolecules, like enzymes, thousand or hundreds of thousands of angstroms apart, seem to recognize each other and self‐assembly, according with their shapes and sizes, in a wide variety of complex structures. In this paper we discuss this long‐range molecular recognition mechanism through a general liquid theory, based on the recognition of the equivalence between particles and fields, and molecular simulations. In particular we show results of a counter‐intuitive attraction between like‐charged colloidal particles and compare them with experimental results.