Strong Attraction between Charged Spheres due to Metastable Ionized States

We report a mechanism which can lead to long-range attractions between like-charged spherical macroions, stemming from the existence of metastable ionized states. We show that the ground state of a single highly charged colloid plus a few excess counterions is overcharged. For the case of two highly charged macroions in their neutralizing divalent counterion solution we demonstrate that, in the regime of strong Coulomb coupling, the counterion clouds are very likely to be unevenly distributed, leading to one overcharged and one undercharged macroion. This long-living metastable configuration in turn leads to a long-range Coulomb attraction.