Abstract
We report quantitative experimental results regarding concentration fluctuations based on a small-angle light-scattering setup. A shadowgraph technique was used to record concentration fluctuations in a free-diffusion cell filled with colloids. Our experimental setup includes an objective attached to the CCD camera to increase the field of view. We performed two separate experiments, one with gold and the other with silica colloids, and extracted both the structure factors and the correlation time during the early stages of concentration fluctuations. The temporal evolution of fluctuations was also qualitatively investigated using recursive plots and spatial-temporal sections of fluctuating images. We found that the correlation time versus wavenumber for gold nanocolloids is concave shaped, whereas, for silica colloids, it is convex shaped. The difference in correlation time behavior is not only due to the size of the particle, but also to possible plasmonic interactions in gold colloids.
© 2009 Optical Society of America
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