We numerically calculate the drag on a sphere or a filament immersed in an incompressible viscous monolayer or membrane on one, or between two, viscous infinitely deep bulk phases. We show that contributions due to the Marangoni effect of the monolayer or membrane account for a significant part of the total drag. Effects of protrusion of objects into the three-dimensional fluids adjacent to the monolayer and membrane are investigated. Known analytical expressions in the limit of a very viscous membrane or monolayer are recovered by our numerics. A sphere in a membrane exhibits maximal drag when symmetrically immersed with the equator coinciding with the membrane plane. No discontinuity of the drag arises when the sphere is totally immersed into the subphase and detaches from the monolayer. Effects of protrusion are more important for objects moving in a membrane or monolayer of low surface viscosity. At large surface shear viscosity protrusions must be larger than the length defined by the ratio of surface to bulk viscosities to alter the drag on the object. Our calculations may be useful for the measurement of hydrodynamic radii of lipid rafts in membranes and for electrocapillary effects of spheres immersed in a surface

We study the autonomous motion of catalytic nanorods in Gibbs monolayers. The catalytic activity of the rods on a hydrogen peroxide aqueous subphase gives rise to anomalous translational and rotational diffusion. The rods perform a Levy-walk superdiffusive motion that can be decomposed into thermal orientation fluctuations and an active motion of the rods with a constant velocity along their long axis. Since interfacial dissipation increases relative to bulk phase dissipation when miniaturizing the size of objects moving in the interface, the autonomous nanorods allow for precise measurements of surface shear viscosities as low as a few nN s/m. The cross over from active motion toward passive diffusion when increasing the surfactant concentration is explained by a loss of friction asymmetry of the rods.

The magnetically driven rotation of 300 nm diameter rods shows the surface viscosity of albumin at an air-water interface increases from 10−9 to 10−5 Ns/m over two hours while the surface pressure saturates in minutes. The increase in surface viscosity is not accompanied by a corresponding increase in elasticity, suggesting that the protein film anneals with time, resulting in a more densely packed film leading to increased resistance to shear. The nanometer dimensions of the rods provide the same sensitivity as passive microrheology with an improved ability to measure more viscous films.

The size distribution of domains in phase-separated lung surfactant monolayers influences monolayer viscoelasticity and compressibility which, in turn, influence monolayer collapse and set the compression at which the minimum surface tension is reached. The surfactant-specific protein SP-B decreases the mean domain size and polydispersity as shown by fluorescence microscopy. From the images, the line tension and dipole density difference are determined by comparing the measured size distributions with a theory derived by minimizing the free energy associated with the domain energy and mixing entropy. We find that SP-B increases the line tension, dipole density difference, and the compressibility modulus at surface pressures up to the squeeze-out pressure. The increase in line tension due to SP-B indicates the protein avoids domain boundaries due to its solubility in the more fluid regions of the film.