Kinetics of self-organization of polyampholyte nanoparticles in solutions

摘要

An appropriate composition of a binary solvent, water-ethanol, provides the necessary thermodynamic environment for the polyampholyte (gelatin) molecules to form self-assembled nano-clusters having fractal dimension, ≈ 2.6, in the bulk (3-D). The aggregation in the bulk of the solution appears to be an anomalous process and could be explained through Smoluchowski aggregation model. It gives a diffusion limited aggregation (DLA) type fractal dimension to the cluster in bulk, but shows extremely low polydispersity, which in fact is a signature of a slowly growing reaction limited cluster aggregation (RLA) process. Experimental results obtained from light scattering and electrophoresis experiments enable us to probe the kinetics of such growth processes.