Isa Lucio
ETH Zürich, Laboratory for Surface Science and Technology, Department of Materials, Wolfgang-Pauli-Strasse 10, CH-8093 Zürich.
Chimia (Aarau). 2013;67(4):231-5. doi: 10.2533/chimia.2013.231.
Since the seminal work of Pickering and Ramsden more than a century ago, adsorption of solid micro- and nanoparticles at the interface between two fluids has been recognized as a means to enormously improve emulsion stability against coalescence. Despite their long-standing use in a vast range of practical applications, several key issues regarding the behavior of small objects at liquid interfaces still remain unresolved. In particular, current techniques fail to investigate the properties of individual particles smaller than 500 nm. An exception to this scenario is a technique that we have recently developed, based on freeze-fracture cryo-SEM, which for the first time makes it possible to measure the wetting properties of single nanoscale objects through a metal shadow-casting protocol. In this work we present additional details and results which showcase the potential of this novel tool as the benchmark for in situ characterization of particles at interfaces.
自一个多世纪前皮克林和拉姆斯登的开创性工作以来，固体微米和纳米颗粒在两种流体界面处的吸附已被视为一种极大提高乳液抗聚结稳定性的方法。尽管它们长期应用于广泛的实际应用中，但关于小物体在液体界面行为的几个关键问题仍未得到解决。特别是，目前的技术无法研究小于500纳米的单个颗粒的特性。我们最近基于冷冻断裂低温扫描电子显微镜开发的一种技术是这种情况的一个例外，该技术首次通过金属阴影投射协议测量单个纳米级物体的润湿性成为可能。在这项工作中，我们展示了更多细节和结果，这些展示了这种新型工具作为界面处颗粒原位表征基准的潜力。
