The Bjerrum length (after Danish chemist Niels Bjerrum 1879–1958 ) is the separation at which the electrostatic interaction between two elementary charges is comparable in magnitude to the thermal energy scale, , where is the Boltzmann constant and is the absolute temperature in Kelvin. This length scale arises naturally in discussions of electrostatic, electrodynamic and electrokinetic phenomena in electrolytes, polyelectrolytes and colloidal dispersions.