ABSTRACT
Colloidal motions in complex environments are ubiquitous in fundamental physics and biology. These situations invariably involve the intricate coupling between confined fluid flows, soft boundaries, surface forces and fluctuations. In the present study, such a coupling is investigated using a combination of holographic microscopy and advanced statistical inference. Specifically, the Brownian motion of soft micrometric oil droplets near rigid walls is quantitatively analyzed. All the key statistical observables are reconstructed with high precision, allowing for nanoscale resolution of local mobilities and femtonewton inference of conservative and nonconservative forces. The analysis reveals the existence of an intriguing, transient but large, soft-Brownian effect. The latter might be of importance for nanophysical and microbiological transport, target finding, or chemical reactions in crowded environments — and hence the whole life machinery.
BIOGRAPHY
Thomas Salez is a CNRS research director in the Aquitaine Waves and Matter Laboratory (LOMA) at University of Bordeaux, France, as well as an invited faculty member of the Faculty of Advanced Life Science, at Hokkaido University, Japan.
He obtained his PhD from ENS Paris, where he developed an experiment in the Kastler Brossel Laboratory to trap and cool down atomic Fermi mixtures and molecules near the absolute-zero temperature, in ultra-high vacuum. He then joined the Gulliver Laboratory at ESPCI Paris, where he studied theoretically the behaviour of soft matter and fluids at the nanoscale, in close connexion with experiments.
Within the EMetBrown group that he created and chair at LOMA in Bordeaux, and in collaboration with a broad and interdisciplinary international network, he currently investigates experimentally and theoretically the properties of amorphous condensed matter and complex systems in confinement and at interfaces.
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