Attractions between charged colloidal spheres mediated by correlated absorbed ions

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We describe arrangements of ions capable of producing short-range attractive interactions between pairs of charged colloidal spheres in the low temperature strongly correlated limit. For particles of radius R with bare charge Z and comparable absorbed charge -N (N Z), the correlations contribution to the spheres self-energy scales as N³/²/R, and as N/R for the interaction energy between two touching spheres. We show that the re-arrangement of charges due to polarization plays an insignificant role in the nature and magnitude of the interaction.