Colloidal interactions in partially quenched suspensions of charged particles

We report measurements of the effective pair potential between charged colloidal particles in a bidimensional matrix of fixed obstacles. A binary mixture of polystyrene spheres in water is confined between two glass plates. The larger particles are trapped by the plates in a disordered configuration with respect to which the smaller species of particles equilibrates. The structures of both the mobile and the fixed species are measured by videomicroscopy. The pair potential, obtained by deconvoluting the structural information via the Ornstein-Zernike equation, exhibits two attractive components. © 1998 The American Physical Society.

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