Impact of saccharides on the drying kinetics of agarose gels measured by in-situ interferometry.

Agarose gels are viscoelastic soft solids that display a porous microstructure filled with water at 90% w/w or more. Despite an extensive use in food industry and microbiology, little is known about the drying kinetics of such squishy solids, which suffers from a lack of time-resolved local measurements. Moreover, only scattered empirical observations are available on the role of the gel composition on the drying kinetics.

Syneresis and delayed detachment in agar plates.

Biogels made of crosslinked polymers such as proteins or polysaccharides behave as porous soft solids and store large amounts of solvent. These gels undergo spontaneous aging, called syneresis, which consists of the shrinkage of the gel matrix and the progressive expulsion of solvent. As a result, a biogel originally casted in a container often loses contact with the container sidewalls, and the detachment time is difficult to anticipate a priori, since it may occur over variable time spans (from hours to days).

Optically driven oscillations of ellipsoidal particles. Part I: experimental observations.

We report experimental observations of the mechanical effects of light on ellipsoidal micrometre-sized dielectric particles, in water as the continuous medium. The particles, made of polystyrene, have shapes varying between near disk-like (aspect ratio k = 0.2) to very elongated needle-like (k = 8).

Colloidal aggregation and dynamics in anisotropic fluids.

We present experiments and numerical simulations to investigate the collective behavior of submicrometer-sized particles immersed in a nematic micellar solution. We use latex spheres with diameters ranging from 190 to 780 nm and study their aggregation properties due to the interplay of the various colloidal forces at work in the system. We found that the morphology of aggregates strongly depends on the particle size, with evidence for two distinct regimes: the biggest inclusions clump together within minutes into either compact clusters or V-like structures that are completely consistent with attractive elastic interactions.

Stokes-Einstein diffusion of colloids in nematics.

We report the experimental observation of anisotropic diffusion of polystyrene particles immersed in a lyotropic liquid crystal with two different anchoring conditions. Diffusion is shown to obey the Stokes-Einstein law for particle diameters ranging from 190 nm up to 2 μm. In the case of prolate micelles, the beads diffuse four times faster along the director than in perpendicular directions, D||/D[Symbol: see text] ≈ 4.