Monte Carlo simulation and integral-equation studies of a fluid of charged hard spheres near the critical region

A detailed Monte Carlo and integral-equation study of the behavior of the restricted primitive model of electrolytes near the critical region is presented. Our simulation results furnish information concerning cluster formation in the low density--high ionic strength region. Additionally, bridge functions have been extracted from the simulated pair correlation functions by means of an iterative procedure. These ``exact'' bridge functions have been compared with the results of a recently proposed integral equation [D. M. Duh and A. D.-J. Haymet, J. Chem. Phys. 97, 7716 (1992)], which has been solved using both a Coulombic and an optimized decomposition of the interionic potential.