Physics Commons^™

Diffusion Of Gold Nanoparticles Within Polymer Solutions And Gels, Kavindya Kumari Senanayake R W H

Wayne State University Dissertations

Soft matter is a subfield of condensed matter physics including systems, such as polymers, colloidal dispersions, liquid crystals, surfactants. Understanding their interaction and dynamics is essential for many interdisciplinary fields of study as well as important for technological advancements. We used gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) to investigate the length-scale dependent dynamics in dilute, semidilute, entangled polymer solutions and gels. Two-photon fluctuation correlation spectroscopy (FCS) technique was used to investigate the translation diffusion coefficient of AuNPs. For polymer solutions, we found that existing hydrodynamic and obstruction models are inadequate to describe the size dependence of the particle diffusion coefficient. Within entangled Poly …