Particle dynamics in polymer-metal nanocomposite thin films on nanometer-length scales

X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy was used in conjunction with resonance-enhanced grazing-incidence small-angle x-ray scattering to probe slow particle dynamics and kinetics in gold/polystyrene nanocomposite thin films. Such enhanced coherent scattering enables, for the first time, measurement of the particle dynamics at wave vectors up to approximately 1 nm(-1) (or a few nanometers spatially) in a disordered system, well in the regime where entanglement, confinement, and particle interaction dominate the dynamics and kinetics. Measurements of the intermediate structure factor f(q,t) indicate that the particle dynamics differ from Stokes-Einstein Brownian motion and are explained in terms of viscoelastic effects and interparticle interactions.