Related papers: Colloidal aggregation and critical Casimir forces …
A recent Letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 156101 (2009)] reports the experimental observation of aggregation of colloidal particles dispersed in a liquid mixture of heavy water and 3-methylpyridine. The experimental data are interpreted in…
We review recent advances in the theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies of critical Casimir forces in soft matter, with particular emphasis on their relevance for the structures of colloidal suspensions and on their dynamics.…
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…
By using the critical Casimir force, we study the attractive strength dependent aggregation of colloids with and without gravity by means of Near Field scattering. Significant differences were seen between microgravity and ground…
We present a numerical study of the effective potential $V_\mathrm{eff}$ between two hard-sphere colloids dispersed in a solvent of interacting particles, for several values of temperature and solvent density, approaching the solvent…
Using the critical Casimir force, we study the attractive-strength dependence of diffusion-limited colloidal aggregation in microgravity. By means of near field scattering we measure both the static and dynamic structure factor of the…
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…
We discuss repulsive Casimir forces between dielectric materials with non trivial magnetic susceptibility. It is shown that considerations based on naive pair-wise summation of Van der Waals and Casimir Polder forces may not only give an…
Colloids immersed in a critical or near-critical binary liquid mixture and close to a chemically patterned substrate are subject to normal and lateral critical Casimir forces of dominating strength. For a single colloid we calculate these…
We investigate the phase behaviour of mixtures of two populations of colloidal particles dispersed in a binary solvent system near its critical composition. The surfaces of particles are chemically modified to elicit a specific solvent…
We consider an ensemble of spherical colloidal particles immersed in a near-critical solvent such as a binary liquid mixture close to its critical demixing point. The emerging long-ranged fluctuations of the corresponding order parameter of…
From experimental studies it is well-known that colloidal particles suspended in a near-critical binary solvent exhibit interesting aggregation phenomena, often associated with colloidal phase transitions, and assumed to be driven by…
The Casimir force between dielectric bodies is well-understood, but not the Casimir force inside a dielectric, in particular its renormalization. We develop and analyse a simple model for the Casimir forces inside a medium that is…
I show that cooperative exclusion processes with selective kinetic constraints exhibit fluctuation-induced forces that can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the density of boundary reservoirs, when their density-dependent diffusion…
We investigate the behavior of colloidal particles immersed in a binary liquid mixture of water and 2,6-lutidine in the presence of a chemically patterned substrate. Close to the critical point of the mixture, the particles are subjected to…
We study the normal and lateral effective critical Casimir forces acting on a spherical colloid immersed in a critical binary solvent and close to a chemically structured substrate with alternating adsorption preference. We calculate the…
If colloidal solute particles are suspended in a solvent close to its critical point, they act as cavities in a fluctuating medium and thereby restrict and modify the fluctuation spectrum in a way which depends on their relative…
In earlier papers we have applied multiple scattering techniques to calculate Casimir forces due to scalar fields between different bodies described by delta function potentials. When the coupling to the potentials became weak, closed-form…
Some time ago, Fisher and de Gennes pointed out that long-ranged correlations in a fluid close to its critical point Tc cause distinct forces between immersed colloidal particles which can even lead to flocculation [C. R. Acad. Sc. Paris B…
In soft and condensed matter physics, effective interactions often emerge as a result of the spatial confinement of a fluctuating field. For instance, microscopic particles in a binary liquid mixture are subject to critical Casimir forces…