0000000000235202
AUTHOR
Larysa Shapran
Electrophoretic flow behaviour and mobility of colloidal fluids and crystals.
We report on measurements of the electrophoretic mobility mu of charged colloidal spheres in the deionized state, where the suspensions show fluid or crystalline order. In the fluid state, parabolic flow profiles are observed due to electro-osmotic solvent flow. In the crystalline state, complex flow profiles occur due to additional crystal cohesion. The mobility mu then may inferred from the flow velocity averaged over the complete cell cross section as performed in our home built super-heterodyne Doppler velocimeter. For two particle species of 68 and 122 nm diameter we measured mu as a function of particle concentration. Starting from a plateau value at low concentration, mu decreases ap…
Qualitative characterisation of effective interactions of charged spheres on different levels of organisation using Alexander’s renormalised charge as reference
Abstract Effective interactions are conveniently determined from experimental or numerical data by fitting a Debye–Huckel potential with an effective charge Z ∗ and an effective electrolyte concentration c ∗ as free parameters. In this contribution we numerically solved the Poisson–Boltzmann equation to obtain the so-called renormalised charge Z PBC ∗ . For sufficiently large bare charge Z one finds a saturation of Z ∗ which scales as Z ∗ = A a / λ B , where a is the particle radius, λ B the Bjerrum length and A a proportionality factor of order (8–10). The saturation value increases with increased total micro-ion concentration and shows a shallow minimum as a function of packing fraction. …
Effective charges along the melting line of colloidal crystals
The shear modulus G of charged colloidal crystals was measured at several constant particle densities n and varying salt concentrations c up to the melting salt concentration cM using torsional resonance spectroscopy. Far from the phase boundary the samples are polycrystalline and the shear modulus stays roughly constant as a function of c. Upon approaching the melting transition an increasing amount of wall based crystal material is formed surrounding a shrinking polycrystalline core and G drops nearly linearly. When the transition is complete G again stays constant. The morphologic transitions may be scaled upon a single master curve. For the polycrystalline morphology, the elastic data a…