From ink to optics, study of particle mixtures yields fundamenta...( -speed transmission of data given the w...)

-speed transmission of data given the way in which they diffract optical signals. In medicine, an enhanced understanding of colloids that contain proteins may enable the design and production of pharmaceutical formulations that are far more stable than those in existence today.

"This is truly pioneering work," said Sanat Kumar, a professor of chemical engineering at Columbia University, who was not affiliated with the research. "Before, the most elementary questions on this difficult, but highly relevant, topic were open. This work has really opened up the field."

Their work also revealed a surprising "love/hate relationship" among highly charged colloidal particles, which causes them to transition directly from a gas to a solid without ever going through a liquid phase. This strange behavior results from the previously observed fact that like-charged particles attract one another at close distances instead of the usual repulsion. At a certain intermediate distance, similarly charged particles switch from being strongly repulsed by one another to incredibly attracted to each other, which causes the phase transition direct from diffuse gas to dense solid.

Panagiotopoulos and Kumar predict that similar simulations of small numbers of particles to calculate the behavior of entire systems will allow researchers to explore a wide variety of fundamental and applied topics in physics, chemistry and biology. For example, the technique could be used in astrophysics to understand phase transitions of dense plasmas or in biology to explore the associations between proteins and DNA, which is key information for understanding the interactions that take place in living cells.

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Contact: Hilary Parker
haparker@princeton.edu
609-258-4597
Princeton University, Engineering School
16-May-2007

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