Equivalence between particles and fields: A general statistical mechanics theory for short and long range many-body forces

While in vacuum fundamental and dispersion inter-molecular forces can be in principle of infinite range, in the bulk, however, they are of rather short-range, typically between a few angstroms to a few hundreds of angstroms. Yet colloidal particles, nano-particles, and supramolecules, like enzymes, thousand or hundreds of thousands of angstroms apart, seem to recognize each other and self-assembly, according with their shapes and sizes, in a wide variety of complex structures. In this paper we discuss this long-range molecular recognition mechanism through a general liquid theory, based on the recognition of the equivalence between particles and fields, and molecular simulations. In particular we show results of a counter-intuitive attraction between like-charged colloidal particles and compare them with experimental results.