Molecular Mass Dependence of Interfacial Tension in Complex Coacervation

DJ Audus and S Ali and AM Rumyantsev and YC Ma and JJ De Pablo and VM Prabhu, PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS, 126, 237801 (2021).

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.237801

The interfacial tension of coacervates, the liquidlike phase composed of oppositely charged polymers that coexists at equilibrium with a supernatant, forms the basis for multiple technologies. Here we present a comprehensive set of experiments and molecular dynamics simulations to probe the effect of molecular mass on interfacial tension gamma, far from the critical point, and derive gamma = gamma(infinity) (1 - h/N), where N is the degree of polymerization, gamma(infinity) is the infinite molecular mass limit, and h is a constant that physically corresponds to the number of monomers of one chain within the coacervate correlation volume.

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