Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 113, Issue 3, Pages 493-496Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1515614113
Keywords
emulsions; membranes' buckling; topological defects; two-dimensional crystals; spontaneous emulsification
Categories
Funding
- Donors of the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Liquid droplets, widely encountered in everyday life, have no flat facets. Here we show that water-dispersed oil droplets can be reversibly temperature-tuned to icosahedral and other faceted shapes, hitherto unreported for liquid droplets. These shape changes are shown to originate in the interplay between interfacial tension and the elasticity of the droplet's 2-nm-thick interfacial monolayer, which crystallizes at some T = T-s above the oil's melting point, with the droplet's bulk remaining liquid. Strikingly, at still-lower temperatures, this interfacial freezing (IF) effect also causes droplets to deform, split, and grow tails. Our findings provide deep insights into molecular-scale elasticity and allow formation of emulsions of tunable stability for directed self-assembly of complex-shaped particles and other future technologies.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available