6533b7d0fe1ef96bd125b6f3

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Single Particle Motion of Hard-Sphere-Like Polymer Micronetwork Colloids Up to the Colloid Glass Transition

subject

description

Polymer micronetwork spheres swollen in a good solvent can be regarded as colloids which require no special stabilisation to avoid aggregation. Their interactions can be timed by changing the degree of internal crosslinking. The phase behaviour and the static structure factor demonstrate that crosslink density of 1:10 (inverse number of monomer units between crosslinks) is sufficient to achieve hard sphere behaviour. We designed a host-tracer system consisting of core-shell micronetwork spheres (core: polystyrene; shell: poly-t-butylacrylate) in a host of refractive-indexmatched poly-t-butylacrylate micronetwork colloids. Employing a crosslink density of 1:10 and tuning the polydispersity such that crystallisation is just avoided we are able to monitor the self-diffusion of a system with hard sphere interactions up to volume fractions close to the colloid glass transition by dynamic light scattering. In addition the long-time self-diffusion was measured with the forced Rayleigh scattering technique.