Controlling colloidal phase transitions with critical Casimir forces

Abstract

The critical Casimir effect provides a thermodynamic analogue of the well-known quantum mechanical Casimir effect. It acts between two surfaces immersed in a critical binary liquid mixture, and results from the confinement of concentration fluctuations of the solvent. Unlike the quantum mechanical effect, the magnitude and range of this attraction can be adjusted with temperature via the solvent correlation length, thus offering new opportunities for the assembly of nano and micron-scale structures. Here, we demonstrate the active assembly control of equilibrium phases using critical Casimir forces. We guide colloidal particles into analogues of molecular liquid and solid phases via exquisite control over their interactions. By measuring the critical Casimir particle pair potential directly from density fluctuations in the colloidal gas, we obtain insight into liquefaction at small scales: We apply the Van der Waals model of molecular liquefaction and show that the colloidal gas-liquid condensation is accurately described by the Van der Waals theory, even on the scale of a few particles. These results open up new possibilities in the active assembly control of micro and nanostructures.

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• Effective Pair Interaction of Patchy Particles in Critical Fluids
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• The square lattice Ising model on the rectangle III: Hankel and Toeplitz determinants
• Water-induced self-oscillatory processes in colloidal systems by the example of instant coffee
• Anisotropic scaling of the two-dimensional Ising model II: surfaces and boundary fields
• Discontinuous change from thermally- to geometrically- dominated effective interactions in colloidal solutions
• Quantum and Critical Casimir Effects: Bridging Fluctuation Physics and Nanotechnology
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