Foam and emulsion stability has long been believed to correlate with the surface shear viscosity of the surfactant used to stabilize them. Many subtleties arise in interpreting surface shear viscosity measurements, however, and correlations do not necessarily indicate causation. Using a sensitive technique designed to excite purely surface shear deformations, we make the most sensitive and precise measurements to date of the surface shear viscosity of a variety of soluble surfactants, focusing on SDS in particular. Our measurements reveal the surface shear viscosity of SDS to be below the sensitivity limit of our technique, giving an upper bound of order 0.01 μN·s/m. This conflicts directly with almost all previous studies, which reported values up to 10 3 -10 4 times higher. Multiple control and complementary measurements confirm this result, including direct visualization of monolayer deformation, for SDS and a wide variety of soluble polymeric, ionic, and nonionic surfactants of high-and low-foaming character. No soluble, small-molecule surfactant was found to have a measurable surface shear viscosity, which seriously undermines most support for any correlation between foam stability and surface shear rheology of soluble surfactants.S urfactants facilitate the formation of foams and emulsions by reducing surface tension, thereby lowering the energy required to create excess surface area (1-3). These multiphase materials, however, are thermodynamically unstable, and coarsen through bubble or drop coalescence, as well as diffusive exchange between bubbles or drops (1, 4-6). Surfactants can additionally be used to control this coarsening rate, with effective foaming surfactants retarding coalescence, and defoamers speeding it. For example, coalescence may be slowed by repulsive forces between the surfactant monolayers adsorbed to either side of the (continuous) phase separating bubbles or drops. Ionic surfactants, for example, introduce electrostatic repulsions (1, 2, 5), whereas nonionic surfactants (e.g., polymers, proteins, or particles) provide steric barriers against coalescence (7-9). Moreover, Marangoni stresses arise when compressional or dilatational deformations drive gradients in surfactant concentration (and thus surface tension). The resulting dilatational surface elasticity resists surface area changes, slowing drainage and rupture of the thin fluid films between adjacent bubbles (4, 5, 10-13).Additionally, surfactant monolayers may exhibit nontrivial rheological responses. For example, the surface shear viscosity η S gives the excess viscosity associated with shearing deformations within the 2D surfactant monolayer. Because surfactant interfaces are inherently compressible, they may exhibit a surface dilatational viscoelasticity η D *, in addition to η S *, even under small-amplitude deformations. This contrasts with incompressible Newtonian liquids, which are well-described by a single scalar viscosity. Moreover, surface shear and dilatational viscosities need not have equal (14), or even compara...

At low mole fractions, cholesterol segregates into 10-to 100-nmdiameter nanodomains dispersed throughout primarily dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) domains in mixed DPPC:cholesterol monolayers. The nanodomains consist of 6:1 DPPC:cholesterol "complexes" that decorate and lengthen DPPC domain boundaries, consistent with a reduced line tension, λ. The surface viscosity of the monolayer, η s , decreases exponentially with the area fraction of the nanodomains at fixed surface pressure over the 0.1-to 10-Hz range of frequencies common to respiration. At fixed cholesterol fraction, the surface viscosity increases exponentially with surface pressure in similar ways for all cholesterol fractions. This increase can be explained with a free-area model that relates η s to the pure DPPC monolayer compressibility and collapse pressure. The elastic modulus, G′, initially decreases with cholesterol fraction, consistent with the decrease in λ expected from the line-active nanodomains, in analogy to 3D emulsions. However, increasing cholesterol further causes a sharp increase in G′ between 4 and 5 mol% cholesterol owing to an evolution in the domain morphology, so that the monolayer is elastic rather than viscous over 0.1-10 Hz. Understanding the effects of small mole fractions of cholesterol should help resolve the controversial role cholesterol plays in human lung surfactants and may give clues as to how cholesterol influences raft formation in cell membranes.surface rheology | isotherms | free-volume model | AFM M inute fractions of cholesterol lead to dramatic changes in dipalmitoylphosphatidylcholine (DPPC) monolayer morphology (Figs. 1-3) (1, 2) and have equally dramatic effects on monolayer dynamic properties. One weight percent cholesterol reduces the surface viscosity, η s , of DPPC monolayers by an order of magnitude, and 2 wt% reduces η s by two orders of magnitude . Atomic force microscopy (AFM) images and microrheological data show that the cholesterol is segregated to lineactive, locally disordered nanodomains that are dispersed in and separate ordered, primarily DPPC domains. As a result, the monolayer retains many of the features of pure DPPC monolayers including a high collapse pressure, high compressibility, and so on, while having significantly lower surface viscosity. This surface viscosity effect suggests a role for cholesterol in lung surfactant (LS), a lipid-protein monolayer necessary to reduce the surface tension in the lung alveoli during respiration (Fig. S1) (3, 4). At present, even the existence of cholesterol in native LS is questioned, because the lung lavage required to harvest LS inevitably causes blood and cell debris to be coextracted, potentially contaminating LS with cholesterol (5). This lack of consensus over the role of cholesterol is reflected in the composition of replacement lung surfactants for neonatal respiratory distress syndrome (NRDS), which occurs in 20,000-30,000 premature births each year (6). Survanta and Curosurf, two clinically approved animalextract replacement surfact...

The self-assembly of polymer-based surfactants and nanoparticles on fluid–fluid interfaces is central to many applications, including dispersion stabilization, creation of novel 2D materials, and surface patterning. Very often these processes involve compressing interfacial monolayers of particles or polymers to obtain a desired material microstructure. At high surface pressures, however, even highly interfacially active objects can desorb from the interface. Methods of directly measuring the energy which keeps the polymer or particles bound to the interface (adsorption/desorption energies) are therefore of high interest for these processes. Moreover, though a geometric description linking adsorption energy and wetting properties through the definition of a contact angle can be established for rigid nano- or microparticles, such a description breaks down for deformable or aggregating objects. Here, we demonstrate a technique to quantify desorption energies directly, by comparing surface pressure–density compression measurements using a Wilhelmy plate and a custom-microfabricated deflection tensiometer. We focus on poly(ethylene oxide)-based polymers and nanoparticles. For PEO-based homo- and copolymers, the adsorption energy of PEO chains scales linearly with molecular weight and can be tuned by changing the subphase composition. Moreover, the desorption surface pressure of PEO-stabilized nanoparticles corresponds to the saturation surface pressure for spontaneously adsorbed monolayers, yielding trapping energies of ∼103 k B T.

We describe a technique that enables sensitive surface pressure measurements of insoluble surfactants with small quantities in enclosed systems. We microfabricate free-floating microtensiometers that rest at liquid interfaces. Our devices isolate clean interfaces from surfactant-laden ones and deform in response to the surface pressure difference. Elastic beam theory enables straightforward interpretation of the measurements and the deliberate engineering of the sensitivity and dynamic range of the device. Surface pressure isotherms for model surfactant monolayers measured using our microtensiometer show excellent agreement with a conventional Wilhelmy plate.

We experimentally study the link between structure, dynamics and mechanical response of two-dimensional (2D) binary mixtures of colloidal microparticles spread at water/oil interfaces. The particles are driven into steady shear by a microdisk forced to rotate at a controlled angular velocity. The flow causes particles to layer into alternating concentric rings of small and big colloids. The formation of such layers is linked to the local, position-dependent shear rate, which triggers two distinct dynamical regimes: particles either move continuously (“Flowing”) close to the microdisk, or exhibit intermittent “Hopping” between local energy minima farther away. The shear-rate-dependent surface viscosity of the monolayers can be extracted from a local interfacial stress balance, giving “macroscopic” flow curves whose behavior corresponds to the distinct microscopic regimes of particle motion. Hopping Regions reveal a higher resistance to flow compared to the Flowing Regions, where spatial organization into layers reduces dissipation.