Enhanced thermal transport through a soft glassy nanodisk paste

We study the diffusion of heat in an aqueous suspension of disk-shaped nanoparticles of Laponite, which has finite elasticity and a pastelike consistency, by using the Mach-Zehnder interferometer. We estimate the thermal diffusivity of the suspension by comparing the experimentally obtained temperature distribution to that with an analytical solution. We observe that, despite the highly constrained Brownian diffusivity of particles owing to its soft glassy nature, suspensions at very small concentrations of Laponite demonstrate significant enhancement in thermal diffusivity. We correlate the observed enhancement with the possible microstructures of the Laponite suspension.