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Strong collective attraction in colloidal clusters on a liquid-air interface

Authors
Pergamenshchik, V. M.
Issue Date
Jan-2009
Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
Keywords
colloids; interface phenomena; nematic liquid crystals
Citation
PHYSICAL REVIEW E, v.79, no.1
Indexed
SCIE
SCOPUS
Journal Title
PHYSICAL REVIEW E
Volume
79
Number
1
URI
https://scholar.korea.ac.kr/handle/2021.sw.korea/120857
DOI
10.1103/PhysRevE.79.011407
ISSN
1539-3755
1550-2376
Abstract
It is shown that in a cluster of many colloids, trapped at a liquid-air interface, the well-known vertical-force-induced pairwise logarithmic attraction changes to a strongly enhanced power-law attraction. In large two-dimensional clusters, the attraction energy scales as the inverse square of the distance between colloids. The enhancement is given by the ratio eta=(square of the capillary length)/(interface surface area per colloid) and can be as large as 10(5). This explains why a very small vertical force on colloids, which is too weak to bring two of them together, can stabilize many-body structures on a liquid-air interface. The profile of a cluster is shown to consist of a large slow collective envelope modulated by a fast low-amplitude perturbation due to individual colloids. A closed equation for the slow envelope, which incorporates an arbitrary power-law repulsion between colloids, is derived. For example, this equation is solved for a large circular cluster with the hard-core colloid repulsion. It is suggested that the predicted effect is responsible for mysterious stabilization of colloidal structures observed in experiments on a surface of isotropic liquid and nematic liquid crystal.
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