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Updated: May 22, 2025

Confocal Imaging of Confined Quiescent and Flowing Colloid-polymer Mixtures
Published on: May 20, 2014
Inhomogeneous diffusion in confined colloidal suspensions
Gerhard Jung1, Alejandro Villada-Balbuena2, Thomas Franosch3
1Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique (LIPhy), Université Grenoble Alpes, 38402 Saint-Martin-d'Hères, France. gerhard.jung.physics@gmail.com.
Abstract:
We have performed confocal microscopy experiments and computer simulations of colloidal suspensions with moderate volume fraction confined between two quasi-parallel, rough walls [A. Villada-Balbuena et al., Soft Matter, 2022, 18, 4699-4714]. Here we investigate many facets of the dynamical properties of the system, such as confined and inhomogeneous diffusion, mean first-passage times and generalized incoherent scattering functions. We observe that the experiment features strong footprints of the confinement in the dynamical properties, such as inhomogeneous diffusion coefficients and non-zero off-diagonal elements in the incoherent scattering function which we can quantitatively model and analyze with computer simulations. This allows us, for example, to systematically investigate the impact of surface roughness. Our comparative study therefore advances the fundamental understanding of the impact of confinement on dynamics in fluids and colloidal suspensions.
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