Ithaca College

Jerome Fung recently received a grant from the American Chemical Society – Petroleum Research Fund to study the properties of a colloidal particle that could be useful for understanding how and why glasses form. The particles change their size with temperature, and the optical tweezers setup being built in Jerome’s lab will be used to study how the particles interact. 

The project we’ll be working on (in collaboration with IC chemist Prof. Michael Haaf) involves studying a type of colloidal particle that might be useful as “model atoms” that can be visualized with microscopy for better understanding how and why glasses form. Glass is one of the biggest mysteries in condensed matter physics: why does something with the structure of a liquid have the mechanical properties of a solid? The particles I’m proposing to grow and study have a temperature-tunable size, are mostly transparent except for a small core, and are expected to interact in a squishy way. There has been a lot of important prior work using colloidal particles as model atoms to study glasses, but very often the particles interact like billiard balls (which may not be as relevant to molecular glasses) and are not easily tunable (so it’s hard to take a single sample and watch it either form a glass or melt). Over the next two years, we’ll grow the particles (in collaboration with Prof. Haaf), measure their interactions (using the holographic optical tweezers setup that is under construction in my lab), and measure the mechanical properties of bulk suspensions of the particles (using user facilities at Cornell).  

Please feel free to contact Professor Jerome Fung at jfung@ithaca.edu to learn more!