Charge oscillations and many-body effects in bundles of like-charged rods

We study charge correlations in bundles of like-charged rods that attract each other via counterion-mediated interactions, using a Debye-Hückel approach. We first show that the approach can predict oscillatory charge correlations in electrolyte solutions once the nonzero ion size is taken into account. We then apply the approach to bundles of rods, and find that the charge correlation function exhibits oscillatory decay due to many-body effective interactions among the rods.