Statics and dynamics of 2D colloidal crystals in a random pinning potential.
We report the first experimental study of a model system of a two-dimensional colloidal crystal in a random pinning potential. The colloidal crystal consists of monodispersed charged polystyrene microspheres suspended in deionized aqueous media and confined near a rough charged surface. It is found that the static orientational correlation function g6(r) decays exponentially for intermediate and strong pinning, in agreement with theories. The driven depinning is dominated by thermally activated creep motion along 1D-like channels between regions with short-range order. A coexistence model is proposed for describing the observations.
Pertsinidis
Alexandros
A
Department of Physics, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912, USA.
Ling
Xinsheng Sean
XS