Adsorption Trajectories and Free-Energy Separatrices for Colloidal Particles in Contact with a Liquid-Liquid Interface

Abstract

We apply the recently developed triangular tessellation technique as presented in [J. de Graaf et al., Phys. Rev. E 80, 051405 (2009)] to calculate the free energy associated with the adsorption of anisotropic colloidal particles at a flat interface. From the free-energy landscape, we analyze the adsorption process, using a simplified version of Langevin dynamics. The present result is a first step to understand the time-dependent behavior of colloids near interfaces. This study shows a wide range of adsorption trajectories, where the emphasis lies on a strong dependence of the dynamics on the orientation of the colloid at initial contact with the interface. We believe that the observed orientational dependence in our simple model can be recovered in suitable experimental systems.

14 pages, 8 figures, 1 table

References in corpus (3)

• Ellipsoidal particles at fluid interfaces
• Adsorption Trajectories and Free-Energy Separatrices for Colloidal Particles in Contact with a Liquid-Liquid Interface
• A Triangular Tessellation Scheme for the Adsorption Free Energy at the Liquid-Liquid Interface: Towards Non-Convex Patterned Colloids

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