Project N1
Colloids at Interfaces
Project leaders
Summary
The central research topic for the Junior Research Group is the behaviour of colloids trapped near or at fluid interfaces. These interfaces may alter the effective interactions between the colloids considerably, thereby giving rise to ordering and self-assembly phenomena different from bulk suspensions. Depending on the size of the colloids (coming from micrometers down to a few nanometers) different physical regimes are probed with an increasing influence of the substructure of the interface. We have investigated all these regimes, and the corresponding highlights can be summarized as:
- Analytical and numerical treatment of colloidal charge renormalization at interfaces, experimental confirmation
- Calculation of capillary wave mediated interactions between isotropic and anisotropic particles as a novel example for the Casimir effect in Soft Matter
- Developmentof multidimensional density functional methods for fundamental measure functionals: application to depletion interactions in hard systems and identification of a novel form for the colloidal limit