Breakthrough instruments and products: Scientific imaging in the short-wave infrared with the NIRvana family of SWIR cameras.

The Short-Wave Infrared Range (SWIR) from 900 to 1700 nm offers many unique opportunities for discovery in scientific imaging. However, the indium gallium arsenide (InGaAs) cameras capable of detecting this wavelength range typically suffer from excessive noise and image artifacts, making scientific imaging challenging. The NIRvana family of InGaAs cameras from Teledyne Princeton Instruments offer "SWIR for Science," through cutting-edge sensor cooling, thermal management, sensor shielding, and image corrections.

Colloidal Particle Adsorption at Water-Water Interfaces with Ultralow Interfacial Tension.

Using fluorescence confocal microscopy we study the adsorption of single latex microparticles at a water-water interface between demixing aqueous solutions of polymers, generally known as a water-in-water emulsion. Similar microparticles at the interface between molecular liquids have exhibited an extremely slow relaxation preventing the observation of expected equilibrium states. This phenomenon has been attributed to "long-lived" metastable states caused by significant energy barriers ΔF∼γA_{d}≫k_{B}T induced by high interfacial tension (γ∼10^{-2}  N/m) and nanoscale surface defects with characteristic areas A_{d}≃10-30  nm^{2}.

Drainage dynamics of thin liquid foam films containing soft PNiPAM microgels: influence of the cross-linking density and concentration.

We investigate the drainage dynamics of thin liquid foam films containing PNiPAM microgel suspensions with two cross-linking densities (1.5 and 5 mol% BIS) and at two microgel concentrations (0.1 and 1% wt).