Effective forces between colloids at interfaces induced by capillary wave-like fluctuations

Abstract

We calculate the effective force mediated by thermally excited capillary waves between spherical or disklike colloids trapped at a fluid interface. This Casimir type interaction is shown to depend sensitively on the boundary conditions imposed at the three-phase contact line. For large distances between the colloids an unexpected cancellation of attractive and repulsive contributions is observed leading to a fluctuation force which decays algebraically very rapidly. For small separations the resulting force is rather strong and it may play an important role in two-dimensional colloid aggregation if direct van der Waals forces are weak.

7 pages, 3 figures, minor revisions, one additional figure

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Cited by in corpus (19)

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• Critical Casimir Effect: Exact Results
• The Importance of Boundary Conditions for Fluctuation Induced Forces between Colloids at Interfaces
• Solvent-mediated interactions between nanoparticles at fluid interfaces
• Stability and interactions of nanocolloids at fluid interfaces: effects of capillary waves and line tensions
• Conformal Field Theory of Critical Casimir Interactions in 2D
• Effective field theory approach to fluctuation-induced forces between colloids at an interface
• Anisotropies in thermal Casimir interactions: ellipsoidal colloids trapped at a fluid interface
• Scattering Approach for Fluctuation--Induced Interactions at Fluid Interfaces
• Fluctuation-induced Interactions in Micro- and Nano-systems: Survey of Some Basic Results
• Dynamics and steady states of a tracer particle in a confined critical fluid
• Critical Casimir forces between defects in the 2D Ising model
• Fluctuation-induced forces between rings threaded around a polymer chain under tension
• Three Body Fluctuation-Induced Interaction at Fluid Interfaces: A Strong Deviation from the Pairwise Summation
• Interface-mediated interactions: Entropic forces of curved membranes
• Effective interaction between a colloid and a soft interface near criticality
• Casimir Interaction between Polydisperse Colloids Trapped at a Fluid Interface