Effective forces between colloids at interfaces induced by capillary wavelike fluctuations

Max-Planck-Institut für Metallforschung - Heisenbergstr. 3 D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany and Institut für Theoretische und Angewandte Physik, Universität Stuttgart Pfaffenwaldring 57, D-70569 Stuttgart, Germany

Received: 13 February 2006
Accepted: 29 April 2006

Abstract

We calculate the effective force mediated by thermally excited capillary waves between spherical or disklike colloids trapped at a fluid interface. This Casimir type interaction is shown to depend sensitively on the boundary conditions imposed at the three-phase contact line. For large distances between the colloids an unexpected cancellation of attractive and repulsive contributions is observed leading to a fluctuation force which decays algebraically very rapidly. For small separations the resulting force is rather strong and it may play an important role in two-dimensional colloid aggregation if direct van der Waals forces are weak.