Session D40 - Poster Session I.
POSTER session, Monday afternoon, March 12
Exhibit Hall, Washington State Convention Center
We report the results of an experimental study of a quasi-one-dimensional hard-sphere fluid. The system consists of uncharged Si colloidal spheres confined in long, uncorrelated 1D-channels whose narrow width forbids mutual passage of spheres along the channel. By tracking the trajectories of the spheres using digital video microscopy, we studied the diffusion and structure of the system as a function of the density of the fluid. Our results show that the behavior of the spheres in self-diffusion is changed gradually from Fickian to non-Fickian near the onset of the collision between the spheres, indicating the correlation between the collision of the hard-spheres and the change in diffusion mechanism. At high density, the self-part of the van Hove function of the system is no longer a Gaussian distribution but a Poisson distribution which can be interpreted using a hydrodynamic analysis for effective wall-drag effect. The pair distribution function of the system can be explained by an analytical expression for a 1D hard-sphere fluid [1]. [1] Y. Rosenfeld, M. Schmidt, H. Lowen and P. Tarazona, Phys. Rev. E 55, 4245 (1997).