Abstract
The phenomenon of sticking of one object to another, which drastically reduces their relative motion, is ubiquitous in nature. We have studied the sticking process of a colloid, suspended in a fluid medium by an optical tweezer, to a rigid substrate. The evolution of the frictional coupling between the two as a function of their separation is detected by the diffusivity of the particle and also by its phase-sensitive response to an in-plane external oscillatory drive applied to the substrate. On contact, the coupling changes abruptly from viscous to elastic for a rigid silica particle, whereas it evolves slowly with time, similar to ageing in glassy systems, for a soft and deformable polystyrene particle. Depending on the relative strengths of the particle–substrate interaction, the tweezer potential and the external drive, three regimes of dynamics—stuck, ageing and non-stuck—are observed in the dynamical phase diagram.
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Acknowledgements
We thank P. Chaikin, D. Dhar, D. Grier, M. W. Kim, S. Nagel, D. Pine and G. V. Shivashankar for helpful discussions.
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Sharma, P., Ghosh, S. & Bhattacharya, S. Microrheology of a sticking transition. Nature Phys 4, 960–966 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1105
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1105
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