Comment on “Monte Carlo study of structural ordering in charged colloids using a long-range attractive interaction”

A recent theoretical analysis [B. V. R. Tata and N. Ise, Phys. Rev. E 58, 2237 (1998)] of interactions and phase transitions in charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions made reference to our previously published measurements [J. C. Crocker and D. G. Grier, Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 352 (1994); 77, 1897 (1996); A. E. Larson and D. G. Grier, Nature (London) 385, 230 (1997)] of colloidal interactions. Tata and Ise claim that our measurements cannot distinguish between predictions of the Derjaguin, Landau, Verwey, and Overbeek (DLVO) theory and those of the competing theory due to Sogami and Ise (SI). We demonstrate that the DLVO theory accurately describes the measured interactions between isolated pairs of like-charged spheres, while the SI theory fails both quantitatively and qualitatively to describe our data.