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Updated: May 4, 2026

Confocal Imaging of Confined Quiescent and Flowing Colloid-polymer Mixtures
Published on: May 20, 2014
Brownian motion and the hydrodynamic friction tensor for colloidal particles of complex shape
Daniela J Kraft1, Raphael Wittkowski2, Borge ten Hagen3
1Center for Soft Matter Research, Department of Physics, New York University, New York, New York 10003.
Abstract:
We synthesize colloidal particles with various anisotropic shapes and track their orientationally resolved Brownian trajectories using confocal microscopy. An analysis of appropriate short-time correlation functions provides direct access to the hydrodynamic friction tensor of the particles revealing nontrivial couplings between the translational and rotational degrees of freedom. The results are consistent with calculations of the hydrodynamic friction tensor in the low-Reynolds-number regime for the experimentally determined particle shapes.
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