Person:

Manoharan, Vinothan

Young's 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 equilibrium analysis has been used to explain why colloids often bind to liquid interfaces, an effect first observed a century ago by Ramsden and Pickering and later exploited in a wide range of material processes, including emulsification, water purification, mineral recovery, encapsulation, and the making of nanostructured materials. But 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. Particles do not reach equilibrium even after 100 seconds, and the relaxation appears logarithmic in time, suggesting that complete equilibration may take months. Surprisingly, viscous dissipation appears to play little role. Instead, the observed dynamics, which bear strong resemblance to aging 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.

We have developed a new method to produce hybrid particles with polyhedral shapes in very high yield (liter quantities at up to 70% purity) using a combination of emulsion polymerization and inorganic surface chemistry. The procedure has been generalized to create complex geometries, including hybrid line segments, triangles, tetrahedra, octahedra, and more. The optical properties of these particles are tailored for studying their dynamics and self-assembly. For example, we produce systems that consist of index-matched spheres allowing us to define the position of each elementary particle in three-dimensional space. We present some preliminary studies on the self-assembly of these complex shaped systems based on electron and optical microscopy.

We present a new, high-speed technique to track the three-dimensional translation and rotation of non-spherical colloidal particles. We capture digital holograms of micrometer-scale silica rods and sub-micrometer-scale Janus particles freely diffusing in water, and then fit numerical scattering models based on the discrete dipole approximation to the measured holograms. This inverse-scattering approach allows us to extract the position and orientation of the particles as a function of time, along with static parameters including the size, shape, and refractive index. The best-fit sizes and refractive indices of both particles agree well with expected values. The technique is able to track the center of mass of the rod to a precision of 35 nm and its orientation to a precision of 1.5°, comparable to or better than the precision of other 3D diffusion measurements on non-spherical particles. Furthermore, the measured translational and rotational diffusion coefficients for the silica rods agree with hydrodynamic predictions for a spherocylinder to within 0.3%. We also show that although the Janus particles have only weak optical asymmetry, the technique can track their 2D translation and azimuthal rotation over a depth of field of several micrometers, yielding independent measurements of the effective hydrodynamic radius that agree to within 0.2%. The internal and external consistency of these measurements validate the technique. Because the discrete dipole approximation can model scattering from arbitrarily shaped particles, our technique could be used in a range of applications, including particle tracking, microrheology, and fundamental studies of colloidal self-assembly or microbial motion.

Digital holographic microscopy is a fast three-dimensional (3D) imaging tool with many applications in soft matter physics. Recent studies have shown that electromagnetic scattering solutions can be fit to digital holograms to obtain the 3D positions of isolated colloidal spheres with nanometer precision and millisecond temporal resolution. Here we describe the results of new techniques that extend the range of systems that can be studied with fitting. We show that an exact multisphere superposition scattering solution can fit holograms of colloidal clusters containing up to six spheres. We also introduce an approximate and computationally simpler solution, Mie superposition, that is valid for multiple spheres spaced several wavelengths or more from one another. We show that this method can be used to analyze holograms of several spheres on an emulsion droplet, and we give a quantitative criterion for assessing its validity.

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.