Evanescent Wave Dynamic Light Scattering of Turbid Media

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that evanescent wave dynamic light scattering (EWDLS) can effectively distinguish between near-wall and bulk dynamics in turbid media, enabling detailed flow characterization in complex samples.

Contribution

The study introduces a combined simulation and experimental approach to separate single and multiple scattering contributions in EWDLS for turbid samples, expanding its applicability.

Findings

EWDLS detects phase-shifted single scattering and multiple scattering contributions.

The method distinguishes near-wall and bulk dynamics in turbid samples.

EWDLS provides simultaneous information on near-wall flow and bulk flow.

Abstract

Dynamics light scattering (DLS) is a widely used techniques to characterize dynamics in soft phases. Evanescent Wave DLS refers to the case of total internal reflection DLS that probes near interface dynamics. We here investigate the use of EWDLS for turbid sample. Using combination of ray-tracing simulation and experiments, we show that a significant fraction of the detected photons are scattered once and has phase shifts distinct from the multiple scattering fraction. It follows that the measured correlation can be separated into two contributions: a single scattering one arising from the evanescent wave scattering, providing information on motion of the "scatterers" and the associated near wall dynamics and a multiple scattering contribution originating from scattering within the bulk of the sample. In case of turbid enough samples, the latter provides diffusive wave spectroscopy (DWS) -like correlation contribution. The validity of the approach is validated using turbid colloidal dispersion at rest and under shear. At rest we used depolarized scattering to distinguish both contributions. Under shear, the two contributions can easily be distinguished as the near wall dynamics and the bulk one are well separated. Information of both the near wall flow and the bulk flow can be retrieved from a single experiment. The simple structure of the measured correlation is opening the use of EWDLS for a large range of samples.