An Improved Form for the Electrostatic Interactions of Polyelectrolytes in Solution and Its Implications for the Analysis of QELSS Experiments on Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate and Cetyl Trimethyl Ammonium Bromide Solutions

The electrostatic interaction between two charged spheres in the presence of a screening electrolyte is calculated at the level of the linearized Debye-Hückel theory. The calculation is performed analytically as a multipole expansion by applying two-center spherical harmonic expansions and symbolic manipulation methods. I focus on charge-charge and charge-induced dipole interactions, calculated for two spheres of possibly unequal size. The former interaction is given to good approximation b...