David M. Kaz

Physical Ageing of the Contact Line on Colloidal Particles at Liquid Interfaces

Youngs law predicts that a colloidal sphere in equilibrium with a liquid interface will straddle the two fluids, its height above the interface defined by an equilibrium contact angle. This has been used to explain why colloids often bind to liquid interfaces, and has been exploited in emulsification, water purification, mineral recovery, encapsulation and the making of nanostructured materials. However, little is known about the dynamics of binding. Here we show that the adsorption of polystyrene microspheres to a water/oil interface is characterized by a sudden breach and an unexpectedly slow relaxation. The relaxation appears logarithmic in time, indicating that complete equilibration may take months. Surprisingly, viscous dissipation appears to play little role. Instead, the observed dynamics, which bear strong resemblance to ageing in glassy systems, agree well with a model describing activated hopping of the contact line over nanoscale surface heterogeneities. These results may provide clues to longstanding questions on colloidal interactions at an interface.

Colloidal self-assembly at an interface

Mix a drop of water into a vial of oil. With some surfactant and a vigorous shake, that one droplet has become thousands, and the total interfacial area has increased by an order of magnitude or more. Like the folded membranes in our mitochondria, the alveoli in our lungs, and the catalytic converters in our cars, oil-water emulsions contain a vast reservoir of interfacial area that can be used to control and transform the things that encounter it. The oil-water interface is especially well-suited to directing the assembly of colloidal particles, which bind to it rapidly and often irreversibly.

Measuring translational, rotational, and vibrational dynamics in colloids with digital holographic microscopy.

We discuss a new method for simultaneously probing translational, rotational, and vibrational dynamics in dilute colloidal suspensions using digital holographic microscopy (DHM). We record digital holograms of clusters of 1-μm-diameter colloidal spheres interacting through short-range attractions, and we fit the holograms to an exact model of the scattering from multiple spheres. The model, based on the T-matrix formulation, accounts for multiple scattering and near-field coupling. We also explicitly account for the non-asymptotic radial decay of the scattered fields, allowing us to accurately fit holograms recorded with the focal plane located as little as 15 μm from the particle. Applying the fitting technique to a time-series of holograms of Brownian dimers allows simultaneous measurement of six dynamical modes - three translational, two rotational, and one vibrational - on timescales ranging from 10(-3) to 1 s. We measure the translational and rotational diffusion constants to a precision of 0.6%, and we use the vibrational data to measure the interaction potential between the spheres to a precision of ∼50 nm in separation distance. Finally, we show that the fitting technique can be used to measure dynamics of clusters containing three or more spheres.

Relaxation dynamics of colloidal particles at liquid interfaces

We study the dynamics of colloidal particles as they approach and breach a water-oil interface. We use a fast 3D imaging technique, digital holographic microscopy, to track particles with 2 nm precision and sub-millisecond time resolution. We find that polystyrene particles dispersed in water or water-glycerol mixtures relax logarithmically with time after breaching the interface and do not reach equilibrium on experimental timescales. By contrast, decane-dispersed PMMA particles show fast dynamics and reach a steady-state height within milliseconds. We attribute the difference to the surface properties of the particles. We also probe the dependence of the relaxation rate on surface charge by studying carboxyl-functionalized particles under varying acid concentrations. We conclude that the slow relaxation may be due to contact-line pinning on topographical defects rather than surface charges.

A Simple, Inexpensive Holographic Microscope

We have built a simple holographic microscope completely out of consumer components. We obtain at least 2.8 ?m resolution and depth of field greater than 200 ?m from an instrument costing less than

STUDYING THE DYNAMICS OF COLLOIDAL PARTICLES WITH DIGITAL HOLOGRAPHIC MICROSCOPY AND ELECTROMAGNETIC SCATTERING SOLUTIONS

1000.

Surface tension evolution during early stages of drying of sol–gel coatings

Digital holographic microscopy (DHM) can measure the 3D positions as well as the scattering properties of colloidal particles in a single 2D image. We describe DHM and our analysis of recorded holograms with exact scattering solutions, which permit the measurement of 3D particle positions with ∼10 nm precision and millisecond time resolution, and discuss studies of the Brownian dynamics of clusters of spheres with DHM.