Surface nanobubbles: Seeing is believing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates optical visualization of surface nanobubbles, providing non-intrusive evidence for their existence and addressing limitations of previous indirect and intrusive methods.

Contribution

It introduces an optical method to visualize surface nanobubbles, confirming their existence without the potential artifacts caused by invasive techniques.

Findings

Optical visualization confirms nanobubbles are real entities.

Previous methods could not definitively distinguish nanobubbles from gassy layers.

The new technique avoids the artifacts of atomic force microscopy.

Abstract

The existence of surface nanobubbles has been previously suggested using various experimental techniques, including attenuated total reflection spectroscopy, quartz crystal microbalance, neutron reflectometry, and x-ray reflectivity, but all of these techniques provide a sole number to quantify the existence of gas over (usually) hundreds of square microns. Thus `nanobubbles' are indistinguishable from a `uniform gassy layer' between surface and liquid. Atomic force microscopy, on the other hand, does show the existence of surface nanobubbles, but the highly intrusive nature of the technique means that a uniform gassy layer could break down into nanobubbles \textit{due to} the motion of the microscope's probe. Here we demonstrate \textit{optical} visualisation of surface nanobubbles, thus validating their individual existence non-intrusively.