This call is chaired by Luis M. Varela (luismiguel.varela@usc.es) and O. Cabeza (oscabe@udc.es). Please contact them, if you would like to share your expertise on this topic or want to collaborate. This is a joint call to bring experimenter and theoreticians together. Once approved by the chairmen to fit to their call, short term missions will get a letter of recommendation from the leaders of working group 2 to increase their chance.
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Despite the undoubted importance of ionic liquids (ILs), theoretical activity in this field has been scarce up to now, and most of the reported experimental and computational research has been usually forced to adopt a somehow casuistic approach. A theoretical framework, able to provide a unified view of the equilibrium and transport properties of these fluids and their mixtures is, consequently, a necessity to gain significant further advance in the field.
Being ILs dense ionic fluids, their major features are essentially determined by electrostatic coupling. However, the conventional mean-field based approach to the description of ionic solutions breaks down at ionic concentrations much lower than those of pure ILs or their dilute mixtures with molecular cosolvents. The details of the electrostatic screening of Coulomb correlations at such high concentrations, the role of electrostatic coupling in the origin of the nanostructuring of ILs, the electrical conductivity or the dielectric behavior of pure ILs and their mixtures, etc. are largely unknown from a theoretical perspective.
Specifically, the following topics should be addressed (among others) both for pure ILs and throughout the concentration regime of their mixtures with molecular cosolvents (water, alcohols…):
* Occurrence of intermediate-range pseudolattice-like ordering in ILs and their mixtures and its theoretical implications for their thermodynamic and transport properties.
* Screening of Coulomb interactions in pure ILs and highly concentrated ionic solutions.
* Transport processes: origins of the conductivity parabola in IL-cosolvent mixtures and of the deviations from the universal behavior at high ionic concentrations (FPE 298, 2010, 280–286,JPCB 2013, 117, 1411–1418); and description of the complex dielectric behavior of these systems (see for example, JPCB 116, 7509 and JPCB 112, 12913).
We are looking forward to a vivid discussion!
