Control of particle assisted wetting by an external magnetic field

It is shown that repulsive particles can assist wetting of a water surface by an organic liquid even at a particle density substantially less than a close packed monolayer. By applying external fields, one can change the interparticle interactions from net attractive to net repulsive and thus induce a transition from nonwetting to wetting conditions. This was achieved by applying superparamagnetic polystyrene particles together with a polymerizable organic liquid (trimethylolpropane trimethacrylate) to a water surface in the middle of a solenoid. Passing a current through the solenoid created a magnetic field perpendicular to the interface that polarized the particles and induced repulsive dipole-dipole forces. Without the field, lenses of the organic liquid that included aggregates of particles floating on the water surface were observed. In the presence of the field, the organic liquid and the particles were evenly distributed across the surface. The interparticle distance increases proportional to the square root of the area per particle and is close to the value expected for hexagonal order.