Science Daily December 12, 2022
The role of hydrodynamic interactions (HIs) play in the self-organization of colloidal suspensions and biological solutions has remained elusive particularly for charged soft matter systems. Researchers in Japan studied the role of HIs in the self-assembly of oppositely charged colloidal particles, which is a promising candidate for electrical tunable soft materials. In many-body HIs and the coupling between the colloid, ion, and fluid motions they found that, under a constant electric field, oppositely charged colloidal particles formed clusters and percolated into a gel network. They revealed that the cluster-forming tendency originates from the incompressibility-induced “inverse squeezing flow” effect that dramatically slows down the disaggregation of attached colloids. According to the researchers their findings indicate that the HI selects a unique kinetic pathway to the nonequilibrium colloidal self-assembly… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Self-assembly of binary charged colloidal particles under a constant electric field… Credit: Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 248001, 9 December 2022