Silica biomineralization associated with unicellular microbes (Cyanidium caldarium) living in strongly acidic hot springs were observed by electron microscopy. The unicellular microbes form green biomats undergoing photosynthesis in Kamuiwakka Falls, Hokkaido, Japan. The hot-spring water is strongly acidic, with pH less than 2, and rich in S. Electron microscopy observations showed that the cel...

Here we report a simple and scalable bottom-up technology for assembling close-packed nanoparticle monolayers on both sides of a glass substrate as high-quality antiglare coatings. Optical measurements show that monolayer coatings consisting of 110 nm silica nanoparticles can significantly reduce optical reflectance and enhance specular transmittance of the glass substrate for a broad range of ...

Polymerization conditions in the Pickering emulsion of colloidal silica-stabilized polystyrene latex were optimized. The influence process on various parameters, including particle size and distribution was investigated. Monomodal particles obtained by conducting at a temperature 80°C slightly acidic environment (pH = 5), while maintaining fast monomer conversion. It has been shown that amount ...

Dynamic light scattering was used to study the dynamic structure factor, S(q,t), of suspensions of charged colloidal silica spheres over the full colloidal time range. We show that a dynamic scaling relation for S(q,t) found by Segrè and Pusey [Phys. Rev. Lett. 77, 771 (1996)10.1103/PhysRevLett.77.771] for hard spheres, relating long-time and short-time dynamics, and collective and self-diffusi...

Colloidal crystals composed of mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) are expected to have various applications because of their unique hierarchical structures and tunable functions. The expansion of the mesopore size is important for introducing guest species which cannot be accommodated by using conventional colloidal crystals of MSNs; however, the preparation of MSNs with a controllable pore...

We propose an adaptation of the osmotic stress technique for determining equations of state of colloids covered by polymer films. We describe here the case of silica particles covered by 6 or 7 layers of polyelectrolyte multilayers. The establishment of a pressure-distance curve allows the interpretation of colloidal interactions over more than four orders of magnitude in pressure. This large r...

We have developed a simple and scalable bottom-up approach for fabricating moth-eye antireflective coatings on GaAs substrates. Monolayer, non-close-packed silica colloidal crystals are created on crystalline GaAs wafers by a spin-coating-based single-layer reduction technique. These colloidal monolayers can be used as etching masks during a BCl(3) dry-etch process to generate subwavelength-str...

Hierarchical microstructures of colloidal crystals have attracted enormous research efforts due to their potential uses in display devices, optical communications, catalytic supports, biosensors, and acoustic materials. Recent progress in selfassembly approaches for such microstructures has shown that regular arrays of microspheres can be easily grown by several clever ways based on well-establ...

We investigate the effect of small concentrations of highly charged nanoparticles on the stability of uncharged colloidal microspheres using large-scale simulations. Employing pair potentials that accurately represent mixtures of silica microspheres and polystyrene nanoparticles as studied experimentally, we are able to demonstrate that nanoparticle-induced stabilization can arise from a relati...