In the twenty years since their inception, modern dynamic light-scattering techniques have become increasingly sophisticated, and their applications have grown exceedingly diverse. Applications of the techniques to problems in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, and fluid mechanics have prolifer ated. It is probably no longer possible for one or two authors to write a monograph to cover in depth the advances in scattering techniques and the main areas in which they have made a major impact. This volume, which we expect to be the first of aseries, presents reviews of selected specialized areas by renowned experts. It makes no attempt to be comprehensive; it emphasizes a body of related applications to polymeric, biological, and colloidal systems, and to critical phenomena. The well-known monographs on dynamic light scattering by Berne and Pecora and by Chu were published almost ten years ago. They provided comprehensive treatments of the general principles of dynamic light scat tering and gave introductions to a wide variety of applications, but natu rally they could not treat the new applications and advances in older ones that have arisen in the last decade. The new applications include studies of interacting particles in solution (Chapter 4); scaling approaches to the dynamics of polymers, including polymers in semidilute solution (Chapter 5); the use of both Fabry-Perot interferometry and photon correlation spectroscopy to study bulk polymers (Chapter 6); studies of micelIes and microemulsions (Chapter 8); studies of polymer gels (Chapter 9).

An effort to expand light-scattering autocorrelation techniques to Brownian diffusional and critical fluid systems in which multiple scattering effects are important, and to understand the observed similarity of the Rayleigh linewidth of light scattered from these two seemingly different systems is discussed. A formalism was developed to find the light field multiply scattered from a suspension of Brownian diffusing particles. For the field doubly scattered from a system of noninteracting Brownian particles, the intensity and correlation time were much less dependent on the scattering angle than for the singly scattered component. The polarized and depolarized correlation times of light scattered from Brownian particle systems were measured. The double-scattering formalism was extended to light scattered from critical fluid systems. In the region k xi greater than 5 the doubly and singly scattered correlation times were nearly equal. The dynamic droplet model of critical phenomena was developed which gives the proper, experimentally verified, forms for the intensity and linewidth of light scattered from a critical fluid. To test the dynamic droplet model and the mode theories Rayleigh linewidth predictions, light-scattering measurements were performed on the critical fluid system methanol and cyclohexane. The data agreed with both the dynamic droplet and decoupled mode theory predictions. The depolarized scattered spectra from a critical fluid were measured, and qualitative agreement with the double-scattering theory was found. 57 figures, 5 tables.

This volume contains most of the papers presented at the "Workshop on Quasielastic Light Scattering Studies of Fluids and Macromolecular Solutions" held at CISE, Segrate (Milano), Italy, from 11 to 13 May, 1979. Quasielastic light scattering (also called self-beating spectroscopy or intensity correlation spectroscopy) is the technique, introduced by Benedek and coworkers and by Cummins and coworkers about 15 years ago, by which dynamical information about a scattering medium is obtained through the measurement of the power spectrum (or the intensity correlation function) of the laser light scattered from the medium. The technique received in the early seventies a considerable impulse from the development of real-time fast digital correlators. The aim of the Workshop was to bring together a selected number of researchers in order to discuss recent developments in quasielastic light scattering and related optical methods and to report about new applications of the technique in physics, chemistry and biology. The first two days of the meeting were devoted to the oral presentations of papers. In the third day an informal session was held which included a very lively and thorough discussion of the highlights of the Workshop. Most part of the technical problems were debated during the informal session and during the subsequent visits to the light scattering laboratory in CISE.

The 13th Conference of the European Colloid and Interface Society (ECIS 99) was held in September 1999 in Dublin, Ireland. It brought together scientists from academic research and industry within the field of physics and chemistry of colloids and interfaces. The Conference focused on the following topics: - Surfactant colloids; - Polymer colloids and solid particles; - Food colloids; - Soft matter interfaces; - Biosystems; - Rheology; - Experimental methods in colloid and interface science.

We experimentally study the fluctuations of Brownian micro-particles trapped with optical tweezers arranged in various spatial configurations. We give a general description of the set-up and detail four different experiments we conducted. We first use a single particle in a double-well potential to model a two-state memory system. We verify the Landauer principle on the minimal energetic cost to erase one bit of information, and we use a detailed version of a fluctuation theorem to retrieve the expected energetic bound. We then use two particles in two different traps to study the hydrodynamic interactions between two systems kept at different effective temperatures. Contrary to what was previously observed, we show that the sol-gel transition of gelatine does not provide any anomalous fluctuations for the trapped particle when the sample is quenched below gelification temperature. However, we show that an effective temperature is created when a well chosen random noise is added on one trap position. We demonstrate that the random forcing on one particle induces an instantaneous correlation between the two particles motions, and an energy exchange from the virtually hot particle to the cold one, which is in equilibrium with the thermal bath. We show a good agreement between the experimental data and the predictions from an hydrodynamic coupling model. Finally, we describe the use of micro-fluidic channels to create a shear flow at the micron size, and we discuss the possibility to interpret the force due to the shear-flow in terms of an effective temperature by testing a fluctuation-dissipation relation.