Interactions and Stress Relaxation in Monolayers of Soft Nanoparticles at Fluid-Fluid Interfaces
Condensed Matter journal club
Interactions and Stress Relaxation in Monolayers of Soft Nanoparticles at Fluid-Fluid Interfaces
- Event time: 11:30am
- Event date: 5th June 2015
- Speaker: Dr Simon Titmuss (School of Physics & Astronomy, University of Edinburgh)
- Location: Room 2511, James Clerk Maxwell Building (JCMB) James Clerk Maxwell Building Peter Guthrie Tait Road Edinburgh EH9 3FD GB
Event details
Abstract
Nanoparticles with grafted layers of ligand molecules behave as soft colloids when they adsorb at fluidfluid interfaces. The ligand brush can deform and reconfigure, adopting a lens-shaped configuration at the interface. This behavior strongly affects the interactions between soft nanoparticles at fluid-fluid interfaces, which have proven challenging to probe experimentally. We measure the surface pressure for a stable 2D interfacial suspension of nanoparticles grafted with ligands, and extract the interaction potential from these data by comparison to Brownian dynamics simulations. A soft repulsive potential with an exponential form accurately reproduces the measured surface pressure data. A more realistic interaction potential model is also fitted to the data to provide insights into the ligand configuration at the interface. The stress of the 2D interfacial suspension upon step compression exhibits a single relaxation time scale, which is also attributable to ligand reconfiguration.PRL 114 article 108301 (2015)
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Authors
Valeria Garbin, Ian Jenkins, Talid Sinno, John C. Crocker, Kathleen J. Stebe
About Condensed Matter journal club
Given the diversity of research in the CM group, chosen topics vary widely. We tend to stick to high-impact journals - Nature, Science, PNAS and PRL have been popular - but this is not prescriptive..