2008 Craig Lecturer
Prof. Colin Bain
Department of Chemistry
Durham University, UK
Presented the first Craig Lecture entitled
'Light: the world's most unlikely construction material'
These words were used by the New
Scientist magazine to describe arrays of particles held together only by
the scattering of light between them. The use of light as a sculptor's
tool or as a construction mortar is only just beginning to be explored.
This talk will describe our recent work on optical binding, which
stimulated the New Scientist article, and the use of optical fields to
shape emulsion droplets and to create and manipulate nanofluidic networks.
held in the RSC Lecture Theatre
on
Tuesday, 11th November, 2008 at 11.00am
Lectures 2 to 5 of the Craig Lecture series explore the
characterisation, structure and properties of ultrathin organic films
- surfactants, lipids, oil - at 'wet' interfaces.
The second Craig Lecture entitled
'Vibrational Spectroscopy of Wet Interfaces'
presented on
Thursday, 13th November 2008 at 11.00am.
Structure and Kinetics in Ultrathin Organic Films
Characterization of nanometre thick films of organic molecules at wet
or buried interfaces is a major challenge. Vibrational spectroscopy is
a powerful analytical technique, possessing both chemical and
structural sensitivity, but water is a difficult environment for
vibrational spectroscopy due to the strong absorption of water across
the mid-infrared region. Nevertheless, developments in vibrational
spectroscopy now permit the detection of fractions of organic
monolayers at aqueous surfaces with short acquisition times. This
talk will use practical examples to illustrate the power of infrared,
Raman and sum-frequency spectroscopy to illuminate structure and
kinetics at wet interfaces, and overturn one or two myths in the
process.
The third Craig Lecture entitled
'Pouring Oil on Troubled Waters'
presented on
Thursday 20th November 2008 at 11am.
Contrary to common experience, pure paraffins do not spread on water.
In the presence of surfactants, alkanes do spread on water and exhibit
a rich variety of wetting and freezing transitions including a
peculiar bilayer phase in which only one of the two layers is frozen.
This talk will show how long-range and short-range interactions
compete to generate complex behaviour from apparently simple
molecules.
The fourth Craig Lecture entitled
'Adsorption Kinetics under Hydrodynamic Control'
presented on
Tuesday, 25th November 2008 at 11am.
This lecture will switch from thermodynamics to kinetics of
adsorption. Surfactants are ubiquitous in industrial and consumer
products, yet surprisingly little is understood about how they affect
interfaces on the short timescales that are relevant in printing,
foams and sprays, detergency and coating. I will show how the use of
steady-state experiments with flowing liquids can be used to probe
adsorption processes on short 'timescales' - even into the microsecond
regime. For adsorption at the solid-liquid interface, steady-state
adsorption experiments are rarely possible, but controlled
hydrodynamics still allows quantitative modelling of adsorption on
timescales of seconds. This talk will cover a number of aspects of
surfactant behaviour including polymer-surfactant interactions, the
effect of micelles, and adsorption barriers at solid-liquid
interfaces.