Liquid-vapor transition and critical behavior of the ultrasoft restricted primitive model of polyelectrolytes: A Monte Carlo study

We present a Monte Carlo study of the liquid-vapor transition and the critical behavior of a model of polyelectrolytes with soft Gaussian charge distributions introduced recently by Coslovich, Hansen, and Kahl [J. Chem. Phys. 134, 244514 (2011)]. A finite size study involving four different volumes in the grand canonical ensemble yields a precise determination of the critical temperature, chemical potential, and density of the model. Attempts to determine the nature of the criticality and to obtain reliable values for the critical exponents are not conclusive. (C) 2014 AIP Publishing LLC.