Exploring the structure of charged colloids in periodic nano-confinements

DOI

Experiments have suggested that particles in a colloidal suspension tend to form layers close to confining walls but this conjecture is difficult to prove unambiguously. Recently, we carried out an experiment on OFFSPEC with a charge-stabilzed colloidal suspension of 180-nm-diameter silica nanoparticles in contact with a specially fabricated silicon diffraction grating with 5-micron-deep rectangular grooves with parallel walls separated by about 300 nm. We found that the colloidal particles form a single close-packed layer in each groove. We now wish to determine how the layering changes with groove width and whether any particular structure (such as a 2-d perfect crystal) develops as a function of depth in the grooves.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.5286/ISIS.E.24091106
Metadata Access https://icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk/oaipmh/request?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=oai:icatisis.esc.rl.ac.uk:inv/24091106
Provenance
Creator Dr Roger Pynn; Ms Sheakha Aldaihan; Professor Rana Ashkar
Publisher ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
Publication Year 2016
Rights CC-BY Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Contact isisdata(at)stfc.ac.uk
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Discipline Photon- and Neutron Geosciences
Temporal Coverage Begin 2013-07-14T23:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2013-07-20T23:00:00Z