Experimental Investigations of Ionic Self-Assembly of Silica Nanoparticles

We present a novel experimental method for determining the rate at which anionic silica nanoparticles in a colloidal suspension are adsorbed to a cationic polymer on a glass substrate. This method allows us to study particle self-assembly at time scales under one tenth of a second, two orders of magnitude smaller than previously reported in literature. We compare our experimental findings with a class of stochastic models for cooperative sequential adsorption of particles.