The renormalized jellium model for spherical and cylindrical colloids

Starting from a mean-field description for a dispersion of highly charged spherical or (parallel) rod-like colloids, we introduce the simplification of a homogeneous background to include the contribution of other polyions to the static field created by a tagged polyion. The charge of this background is self-consistently renormalized to coincide with the polyion effective charge, the latter quantity thereby exhibiting a non-trivial density dependence, which directly enters into the equation of state through a simple analytical expression. The good agreement observed between the pressure calculated using the renormalized jellium and Monte Carlo simulations confirms the relevance of the {renormalized} jellium model for theoretical and experimental purposes and provides an alternative to the Poisson-Boltzmann cell model since it is free of some of the intrinsic limitations of this approach.