Polyelectrolyte solution confined between oppositely charged dielectric surfaces

We study a polyelectrolyte solution confined between two oppositely charged dielectric surfaces by a coarse-grained molecular dynamics simulations. Randomly charged beads as in sodium polystyrene sulfonate with varying degrees of sulfonation are modeled using implicit solvent with explicit ions. The charged electrodes that confine the polyelectrolyte solution are considered to be made of a low dielectric constant material such as graphene. We employ an efficient algorithm for computing the induced charges and investigate various properties of our system, such as the capacitance and its relation to the polymer conformation and charge density. We observe counter-intuitive phenomena such as charge amplification where a layer of ions adsorb close to a surface of same charge to allow more polymer adsorption.