Effective multipoles and Yukawa electrostatics in dressed molecule theory

In this paper we derive the multipolar expansion of the screened Coulomb potential in electrolyte solutions with molecular solvent. The solute and solvent molecules can have arbitrary sizes, shapes, and internal charge distributions. We use the exact statistical mechanical definition of renormalized charge distributions coming from "dressed molecule theory" to determine the effective multipoles of a molecule immersed in an electrolyte. The effects of many-body correlations are fully included in our formally exact theory. We restrict ourselves to sufficiently dilute solutions so the screened Coulomb potential decays for large distances like a Yukawa function, exp ( − κ r ) ∕ r , where r is the distance and 1 ∕ κ is the decay length (it is normally different from the Debye length). The resulting "Yukawa electrostatics" differ in many respects from ordinary, unscreened electrostatics. The "Yukawa charge" of a molecule (the lowest order moment in the multipolar expansion) is in general not equal to its Coulombic charge and it is not the integral of the renormalized charge distribution of the molecule. Moreover, as shown in this paper, the multipolar expansion of the Yukawa potential does not correspond, contrary to the case of the Coulomb potential, to its asymptotic expansion for large r . As a consequence, the charge term in the multipolar expansion is not the leading term in the asymptotic expansion. Instead, for large r values, multipoles of all orders contribute to the leading asymptotic term. Thus, the electrostatic potential from, for example, an electroneutral solvent molecule in an electrolyte solution has generally the same range as that from an ion. The proper asymptotic expansion for electrostatic interactions in electrolytes is derived. It is briefly shown how the multipole expansion formalism can also be applied in the Poisson-Boltzmann approximation for primitive model electrolytes.