Statical Properties of Confined Colloidal Suspensions
Abstract
The study of colloidal systems is an exiting (and not always well undestood) field of research, especially in the case of inhomogeneous systems, i.e. a system in the presence of an external field such as confining boundaries. An experimental study of a confined colloidal suspension has been performed. Our system consists of 0.5 μ m polystyrene beads suspended in purified water and confined between two glass walls which are pressed until a single layer of beads is obtained. We use high-resolution digital video microscopy to measure the distribution of particle locations for suspensions over a large range of volume fractions. We analyze the measured pair correlation functions using the Ornstein-Zernike equation together with a closure relation to extract the effective pair interaction potential. The results of these measurements appear to be inconsistent with the standard DLVO theory for electrostatic colloidal interactions. We will discuss possible origins for this discrepancy.
- Publication:
-
APS March Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- March 1996
- Bibcode:
- 1996APS..MAR.E1703C