Charge-Selective Forcing in Liquids Under Rapid Electrostatic Relaxation: A Solvent-General Framework for Counterion-Deficient States

Counterion-deficient liquid states are formulated within a solvent-general framework for charge-selective forcing under rapid electrostatic relaxation. When the Maxwell relaxation time is short relative to the forcing or chemical timescale, persistent bulk space charge is not an admissible long-lived description: the liquid interior relaxes toward near electroneutrality, finite residual charge localizes predominantly at the interface, and the compensating opposite charge need not be stored as an ordinary dissolved counterion in the same phase. On that basis, two complementary forcing branches are developed. In the negative branch, low-entry-energy electron delivery reduces dissolved cations or plates neutral material by populating the lowest accessible acceptor manifold, leaving anion-rich dissolved states. In the positive branch, low-entry-energy noble-gas dications act as formally universal two-electron scavengers that remove electrons from the highest available occupied density, including solvated-electron populations, lone-pair-rich molecular donors, and halide anions. A solvent-general admissibility window is derived in terms of entry kinetic energy, Maxwell relaxation, interfacial field, Rayleigh stability, leakage time, and heat-removal capacity. From these constraints, explicit operatingcurrent bounds are obtained, and an illustrative aqueous benchmark shows how Rayleigh, dielectric, and thermal limits separate in practice. Water, electron-solvating media such as calcium in tetrahydrofuran, and halide-containing liquids such as LiCl in tetrahydrofuran serve as representative realizations. The framework therefore yields predictive bookkeeping relations, dimensionless admissibility parameters, a noble-gas dication energy ladder, operational current ceilings, and experimentally falsifiable signatures that distinguish counterion-deficient chemistry from ordinary dissolved countercharge compensation.