Controlling colloidal phase transitions with critical Casimir forces

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how critical Casimir forces can be used to actively control the assembly of colloidal particles into liquid and solid phases, with tunable interactions via temperature, enabling precise micro and nanostructure formation.

Contribution

It introduces a method to manipulate colloidal phase transitions using critical Casimir forces, providing direct measurement of pair potentials and applying Van der Waals theory at microscopic scales.

Findings

Critical Casimir forces can be tuned with temperature to control colloidal assembly.

Colloidal gas-liquid condensation follows Van der Waals theory even at small scales.

Direct measurement of pair potentials reveals insights into micro-scale liquefaction.

Abstract

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 fluctuations of the solvent. Unlike the quantum mechanical effect, the magnitude and range of this attraction can be adjusted with temperature via the solvent correlation length, thus offering new opportunities for the assembly of nano and micron-scale structures. Here, we demonstrate the active assembly control of equilibrium phases using critical Casimir forces. We guide colloidal particles into analogues of molecular liquid and solid phases via exquisite control over their interactions. By measuring the critical Casimir particle pair potential directly from density fluctuations in the colloidal gas, we obtain insight into liquefaction at small scales: We apply the Van der Waals model of molecular liquefaction and show that the colloidal gas-liquid condensation is accurately described by the Van der Waals theory, even on the scale of a few particles. These results open up new possibilities in the active assembly control of micro and nanostructures.