Interactions and phase behaviour of polyelectrolyte star solutions

In this work, we first briefly review recent results regarding effective interactions of charged star polymers (polyelectrolyte stars) and then we present new results for many-body systems obtained by employing this interaction. The dominant role is played by the trapped counterions that bring about an entropic repulsion between the centres of these macromolecular aggregates. Subsequently, we explicitly derive density-dependent effective interaction potentials between the polyelectrolyte stars and calculate liquid structure factors and solid-state zerotemperature phase diagrams, discovering thereby a large variety of different crystal phases, similar to those found for the case of neutral star polymers.