Crossover scales at the critical points of fluids with electrostatic interactions

Criticality in a fluid of dielectric constant D that exhibits Ising-type behavior is studied as additional electrostatic (i.e., ionic) interactions are turned on. An exploratory perturbative calculation is performed for small ionicity as measured by the ratio of the electrostatic energy e(2)/Da (of two univalent charges, +/-e, separated by the atomic/ionic diameter a) to k(B)T(c)(0) which represents the strength of the short-range nonionic (i.e., van der Waals) interactions in the uncharged fluid. With the aid of distinct transformations for the short-range and for the Coulombic interactions, an effective Hamiltonian with coefficients depending on the ionicity is derived at the Debye-Huckel limiting-law level for a fully symmetric model. The crossover between classical (mean-field) and Ising behavior is then estimated using a Ginzburg criterion. This indicates that the reduced crossover temperature depends only weakly on the ionicity (and on the range of the nonionic potentials); however, the trends do correlate with the, much stronger, dependence observed experimentally. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0021-9606(99)51020-9].