Coarse-Graining of Ionic Microgels: Theory and Experiment
In this work, we discuss the statistical mechanics of many-body systems consisting of electrically charged microgels, and we show that their collective behavior is determined by an interplay between the screened electrostatic and the elastic contributions to their effective interaction potential. The former is derived by means of a statistical-mechanical approach due to Denton [A. R. Denton, Phys.