Spontaneous formation of mesostructures in colloidal monolayers trapped at the air-water interface:: A simple explanation

The spontaneous formation of loosely bound ordered aggregates, foam, voids, chains, striations, and loops (see Figure 1a), called mesostructures hereafter, has been observed in colloidal monolayers trapped at the air-water interface.(1-6) The distance between particles in these mesostructures is of the order of the particle radius (micrometers), implying that the colloidal interaction potential has a minimum at such distances, which could induce the phase separation of colloidal monolayers in dense and dilute regions. This is at odds with the accepted theory (Derjaguin-Landau-Verwey-Overbeek (DLVO)) of colloidal interactions,7,8 which predicts a secondary minimum at distances of nanometers between pairs of interacting particles. Moreover, the introduction of capillary, hydrophobic, and dipolar interactions(9) between particles in an extended DLVO theory is not able to explain the spontaneous formation of mesostructures either. Recently, a great deal of effort has focused on understanding the mechanism behind the phenomenon of long-range attraction between colloidal particles confined in interfaces. (1,2,10-11) In particular, this attraction has been employed to explain the spontaneous formation of mesostructures. Here, we show that the appearance of our mesostructures is due to the contamination of colloidal monolayers by silicone oil (poly(dimethylsiloxane)), which arises from the coating of the needles and syringes used to deposit and spread the particle solution at the air-water interface. The difference in the interfacial tension of water and silicone oil accounts for the formation of the experimentally observed mesostructures.