Electrostatic heteroaggregation regimes in colloidal suspensions

Despite of their importance for many industrial applications and the understanding of natural phenomena, heteroaggregation processes have not been in the focus of attention of the scientific community until quite recently. Still nowadays, their tremendously complex nature turns a detailed experimental and theoretical treatment of these processes into a difficult task. Hence, we have limited the scope of this review to electrostatic heteroaggregation arising in symmetric two-component systems, i.e., those with the same concentration of cationic and anionic particles. The short and long-time aggregation kinetics will be addressed not only from an experimental but also from a theoretical and simulation point of view at almost six orders of magnitude of electrolyte concentration. The different aggregation regimes will be identified and described in detail.