Abstract
The rheology of suspensions of colloidal particles plays a critical role in many technological applications where it is essential to control the flow properties by tuning the shear viscosity. Theoretical calculations showed that introducing porosity into colloids gives an additional degree of freedom to tune their hydrodynamic properties. The goal of this project is to carry out an x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) study on such nano-particles to verify these theories, using nanoparticles of precisely controlled size and porosity which became available recently. To distinguish between prevailing theories we need to reach the high q plateau of the hydrodynamic function, where q denotes the momentum transfer in scattering.
