An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

# Molecular Mass Dependence of Interfacial Tension in Complex Coacervation

Published

### Author(s)

Debra Audus, Samim Ali, Artem Rumyantsev, Yuanchi Ma, Juan J. de Pablo, Vivek Prabhu

### Abstract

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 $\gamma = \gamma_\infty (1-h/N)$, where $N$ is the degree of polymerization, $\gamma_\infty$ 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.
Citation
Physical Review Letters
Volume
126

## Citation

Audus, D. , Ali, S. , Rumyantsev, A. , Ma, Y. , de Pablo, J. and Prabhu, V. (2021), Molecular Mass Dependence of Interfacial Tension in Complex Coacervation, Physical Review Letters, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.237801, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=931146 (Accessed May 23, 2022)
Created June 11, 2021, Updated October 14, 2021