Compression of colloidal monolayers at liquid interfaces: in situ vs. ex situ investigation

Abstract

The assembly of colloidal particles at liquid/liquid or air/liquid interfaces is a versatile procedure to create microstructured monolayers and study their behavior under compression. When combined with soft and deformable particles such as microgels, compression is used to tune not only the interparticle distance but also the underlying microstructure of the monolayer. So far, the great majority of studies on microgel-laden interfaces is conducted ex situ after transfer to solid substrates, for example, via Langmuir-Blodgett deposition. This type of analysis relies on the stringent assumption that the microstructure is conserved during transfer and subsequent drying. In this work, we couple a Langmuir trough to a custom-built small-angle light scattering setup to monitor colloidal monolayers in situ during compression. By comparing the results with ex situ and in situ microscopy measurements, we conclude that Langmuir-Blodgett deposition can alter the structural properties of the colloidal monolayers significantly.

44 pages in total, 33 pages of main manuscript with 10 figures

References in corpus (3)

• In-situ study of the impact of temperature and architecture on the interfacial structure of microgels
• Fabrication of polyhedral particles from spherical colloids and their self-assembly into rotator phases
• Micron-sized silica-PNIPAM core-shell microgels with tunable shell-to-core ratio

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Softness Matters: Effects of Compression on the Behavior of Adsorbed Microgels at Interfaces
• Drying of Soft Colloidal Films
• Interfacial fluid rheology of soft particles
• In situ vs ex situ: Comparing the structure of PNIPAM microgels at the air/water and air/solid interfaces
• Soft ULC Microgels at the Interface Interact and Flow as Hertzian-Like Colloids
• Collective dynamics and elasto-chemical cluster waves in communicating colloids with explicit size response