Assessing Pair Interaction Potentials of Nanoparticles on Liquid Interfaces

The pair interaction potentials of polymer-grafted silica nanoparticles (NPs) at liquid surfaces were determined by scanning electron microscopy, exploiting the nonvolatility of ionic liquids to stabilize the specimens against microscope vacuum. Even at near contact, individual, two-dimensionally we...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:ACS nano 2019-03, Vol.13 (3), p.3075-3082
Main Authors: Kim, Paul Y, Gao, Yige, Chai, Yu, Ashby, Paul D, Ribbe, Alexander E, Hoagland, David A, Russell, Thomas P
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
atomic force microscopy
electron microscopy
interaction potential
ionic liquid
liquid interface
nanoparticles
NANOSCIENCE AND NANOTECHNOLOGY
polymer ligand
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Summary:The pair interaction potentials of polymer-grafted silica nanoparticles (NPs) at liquid surfaces were determined by scanning electron microscopy, exploiting the nonvolatility of ionic liquids to stabilize the specimens against microscope vacuum. Even at near contact, individual, two-dimensionally well-dispersed NPs were resolved. The potential of mean force, reduced to the pair interaction potential for dilute NPs, was extracted with good accuracy from the radial distribution function, as both NP diameter and grafted polymer chain length were varied. While NP polydispersity somewhat broadened the core repulsion, the pair potential well-approximated a hard sphere interaction, making these systems suitable for model studies of interfacially bound NPs. For short (5 kDa) poly­(ethylene glycol) ligands, a weak (
ISSN:1936-0851
1936-086X
DOI:10.1021/acsnano.8b08189