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Updated: Jun 23, 2026

Advanced Compositional Analysis of Nanoparticle-polymer Composites Using Direct Fluorescence Imaging
Published on: July 19, 2016
Complex dynamics in polymer nanocomposites
S Srivastava1, A K Kandar, J K Basu
1Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560 012, India.
Abstract:
Polymer nanocomposites offer the potential to create a new type of hybrid material with unique thermal, optical, or electrical properties. Understanding their structure, phase behavior, and dynamics is crucial for realizing such potentials. In this work we provide an experimental insight into the dynamics of such composites in terms of the temperature, wave vector, and volume fraction of nanoparticles, using multispeckle synchrotron x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy measurements on gold nanoparticles embedded in polymethylmethacrylate. Detailed analysis of the intermediate scattering functions reveals possible existence of an intrinsic length scale for dynamic heterogeneity in polymer nanocomposites similar to that seen in other soft materials like colloidal gels and glasses.
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