Dynamics and rheology under continuous shear flow studied by X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy

TL;DR

This paper advances X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) by integrating continuous flow to study the dynamics and rheology of soft materials, enabling damage mitigation and new time-resolved insights into complex fluid behavior.

Contribution

It develops an experimental technique combining XPCS with continuous flow, allowing quantification of advective and diffusive dynamics in soft matter under shear or flow conditions.

Findings

Quantifies macroscopic flow response from X-ray data

Separates advective and diffusive microscopic dynamics

Demonstrates potential for studying complex fluids under flow

Abstract

X-ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) has emerged as a unique technique allowing the measurement of dynamics in materials on mesoscopic lengthscales. In particular, applications in soft matter physics cover a broad range of topics which include, but are not limited to, nanostructured materials such as colloidal suspensions or polymers, dynamics at liquid surfaces, membranes and interfaces, and the glass or gel transition. One of the most common problems associated with the use of bright X-ray beams with soft materials is beam induced radiation damage, and this is likely to become an even more limiting factor at future synchrotron and free electron laser sources. Flowing the sample during data acquisition is one of the simplest method allowing to limit the radiation damage. In addition to distributing the dose over many different scatterers, the method also enables new functionalities such as time-resolved studies in mixing cells. Here, we further develop an experimental technique that was recently proposed combining XPCS and continuously flowing samples. More specifically, we use a model system to show how the macroscopic advective response to flow and the microscopic dissipative dynamics (diffusion) can be quantified from the X-ray data. The method has many potential applications, e.g. dynamics of glasses and gels under continuous shear/flow, protein aggregations processes, the interplay between dynamics and rheology in complex fluids.