Direct Measurement of Surfactant-Mediated Picoforces among Nanoparticles in a Quasi-Two-Dimensional Environment

The lack of methodologies which enable us to measure forces acting between nanomaterials is one of the factors limiting the full comprehension of their behavior and their more effective exploitation in new devices. Here we exploit the irreversible adsorption of surfactant-decorated nanoparticles at the air/water interface to investigate interparticle forces and the effect of the surfactant structure on them. We measured the interparticle repulsive forces as a function of the modulation of the interparticle distance by simultaneously performing compression isotherms and the grazing incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) structural characterization of the monolayers at water-vapor interfaces. Our results demonstrate that the short-range interparticle forces are strongly affected by the presence of the organic ligands, which are shown to be able to influence the interparticle repulsions even when added in micromolar amounts. In particular, we demonstrate the predominant steric nature of short-range forces, which are accounted for in terms of the compression-induced stretched-to-coiled conforma-tional transition of the ligand hydrophobic tail.

Automated summary

The lack of methodologies to measure forces acting between nanomaterials limits our understanding of their behavior and their potential in new devices. In this study, we used the irreversible adsorption of surfactant-decorated nanoparticles at the air/water interface to investigate interparticle forces and the impact of surfactant structure. Our results showed that short-range interparticle forces were strongly influenced by the presence of organic ligands, which could even affect repulsive forces in micromolar amounts.