Optical sizing of nanoparticles in thin films of nonabsorbing nanocolloids

We study an optical method to infer the size of nanoparticles in a thin film of a dilute nonabsorbing nanocolloid. It is based on determining the contribution of the nanoparticles to the complex effective refractive index of a suspension from reflectivity versus the angle of incidence curves in an internal reflection configuration. The method requires knowing only approximately the particles' refractive index and volume fraction. The error margin in the refractive index used to illustrate this technique was 2%. The method is applicable to sizing nanoparticles from a few tens of nanometers to about 200 nm in radius and requires a small volume of the sample, in the range of a few microliters. The method could be used to sense nanoparticle aggregation and is suitable to be integrated into microfluidic devices.