Professor Erika Eiser

I am interested in flow of complex fluids in bulk and mesoscopic confinement. In particular, I am studying the underlying self-assembled structure of surfactant and polymer solutions as they are sheared using bulk rheology combined with synchrotron radiation (Small Angle X-ray Scattering).

Recently we build up an optical-tweezers setup as micro-heometer. This method uses a colloidal bead as probe. Monitoring the thermal fluctuations of this bead in time allows us to extract the equilibrium properties of a viscoelastic system, such as the storage (G') and loss (G'') modulus. This setup is ideal for studying fluids in confinement such as micro-fluidic devices, and also in very small volumes.

Systems studied so far are:

• Fluctuation-dissipation theorem in aging clay suspensions
• Flow of micellar cubic crystals in aqueous Pluronics (triblock copolymers) systems
• Doping of sponge and hexagonal surfactant phases with catalytic metal nano-clusters
• Effect of doping on the mechanical properties of a surfactant spong phase