A statistical light scattering approach to separating fast and slow dynamics: application to a model system

Light scattering is a powerful technique to study the structural and dynamical properties of biomolecular systems or other soft materials such as polymeric solutions and blends or gels. An important application of this technique is the study of the kinetics of formation of supramolecular structures. However, in such cases, the system under study is rapidly changing, and consequently the integration time for each measurement is limited. In order to overcome this difficulty, a statistical approach has been developed based on the analysis of the scattered light intensity distribution (Manno et al. 2006, 2004). Indeed the intensity distribution depends upon the ratio between the integration time of each measurement and the coherence time of scattered radiation. This method has been applied to protein aggregation (Manno et al. 2006) and to sol-gel transition (Manno et al. 2004), to obtain information on the heterogeneity of morphological and dynamical features during such processes. In the present work, we accurately test the validity of this approach by analyzing the statistical properties of the light scattered by a model system: a solution of polystyrene spherical macromolecules of different sizes. Each molecular size is related to a given diffusion coefficient and to a given coherence time of the scattered intensity. The effect of changing the experimental integration time is systematically investigated. A mixture of particles of two different sizes is also analyzed to test the validity and robustness of the model based on the convolution of a gaussian with an exponential distribution.