Eric Dufresne
Yale University
Friday, December 8, 2006
4:00 pm in SPL 57
Shedding Light on Brownian Motion
Abstract: Colloidal suspensions are ubiquitous. Blood, toothpaste, and ink are a few familiar examples. Colloids first captured the imagination of physicists with Einstein’s 1905 paper on Brownian motion. Now, colloids are increasingly chosen as model condensed matter systems because of their relative accessibility and versatility. In this talk, I will describe our recent work on optical micromanipulation and colloidal electrostatics. In particular, I will show how Einstein’s formulation of the fluctuation-dissipation theorem can be exploited to measure femtonewton-scale forces between colloidal particles.
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