Electrokinetic behavior of two touching inhomogeneous biological cells and colloidal particles: Effects of multipolar interactions

Abstract

We present a theory to investigate electro-kinetic behavior, namely, electrorotation and dielectrophoresis under alternating current (AC) applied fields for a pair of touching inhomogeneous colloidal particles and biological cells. These inhomogeneous particles are treated as graded ones with physically motivated model dielectric and conductivity profiles. The mutual polarization interaction between the particles yields a change in their respective dipole moments, and hence in the AC electrokinetic spectra. The multipolar interactions between polarized particles are accurately captured by the multiple images method. In the point-dipole limit, our theory reproduces the known results. We find that the multipolar interactions as well as the spatial fluctuations inside the particles can affect the AC electrokinetic spectra significantly.

Revised version with minor changes: References added and discussion extended

References in corpus (5)

• Electrorotation in graded colloidal suspensions
• Dielectrophoresis of charged colloidal suspensions
• Theory of ac electrokinetic behavior of spheroidal cell suspensions with an intrinsic dispersion
• Ground state of a polydisperse electrorheological solid: Beyond the dipole approximation
• Nonlinear ac response of colloidal suspension with an intrinsic dispersion

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Effective conductivity of composites of graded spherical particles
• Enhanced dielectrophoresis of nanocolloids by dimer formation
• Comment on the use of the method of images for calculating electromagnetic responses of interacting spheres
• Comment on "Optical Response of Strongly Coupled Nanopraticles in Dimer Arrays" (Phys. Rev. B 71(4), 045404, 2005)