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Understanding the interactions between viruses and surfaces or interfaces isimportant, as they provide the principles underpinning the cleaning anddisinfection of contaminated surfaces. Yet, the physics of such interactions iscurrently poorly understood. For instance, there are longstanding experimentalobservations suggesting that the presence of air-water interfaces cangenerically inactivate and kill viruses, yet the mechanism underlying thisphenomenon remains unknown. Here we use theory and simulations to show thatelectrostatics provides one such mechanism, and that this is very general.Thus, we predict that the free energy of an RNA virus should increase byseveral thousands of $k_BT$ as the virion breaches an air-water interface. Wealso show that the fate of a virus approaching a generic liquid-liquidinterface depends strongly on the detailed balance between interfacial andelectrostatic forces, which can be tuned, for instance, by choosing differentmedia to contact a virus-laden respiratory droplet. We propose that theseresults can be used to design effective strategies for surface disinfection.Intriguingly, tunability requires electrostatic and interfacial forces to scalesimilarly with viral size, which naturally occurs when charges are arranged ina double-shell distribution as in RNA viruses like influenza and allcoronaviruses.

Electrostatic inactivation of RNA viruses at air-water and liquid-liquid interfaces