Reply to “Comment on ‘Monte Carlo study of structural ordering in charged colloids using a long-range attractive interaction’ ”

Abstract

In the Comment by Grier and Crocker (preceding paper) the authors tried to refute our criticism [Phys. Rev. E 58, 2237 (1998)] on their work [J. C. Crocker and D. G. Grier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 1897 (1996)] by simply fitting once again their old experimental data. Grier and Crocker claim that their pair-potential measurements on aqueous dilute suspension of charged colloidal particles confined between charged glass walls at gap of about [Formula Presented] provide evidence for the failure of Sogami-Ise (SI) theory and demonstrate the applicability of the Dejaguin, Landau, Vervey, and Overbeek (DLVO) theory. Grier and Crocker do not provide additional experimental proof to counter our criticism. We continue to claim here based on our conductivity and conductometric titration measurements, which allow estimating the effective charge and determining the number and nature of the dissociable sites respectively, that their measurements using not well-characterized samples cannot provide clear evidence for the failure of SI theory. With the evidences available in literature, we refute all of the Grier and Crocker comments, including the effect of charged wall confinement on the measured colloidal interactions. © 2000 The American Physical Society.