Leandra Boucheron, a graduate student in Oleg Shpyrko’s group at the University of California, San Diego, won an award for best student poster at the Advanced Photon Source Users Meeting 2014, held at Argonne National Laboratory in May.
Her poster, “Jamming Transition in Quasi-2D Self-Assembled Nanoparticle Monolayers,” combined X-Ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy (XPCS) work done at sector 8-ID with liquid-surface Grazing Incidence Diffraction (GID) measurements from sector 15-ID. Along with her colleagues, Leandra studied the structure and dynamics of monolayers of iron oxide nanoparticles self-assembled at the air-water interface. They found evidence of anomalous diffusion and jamming in their system. A jamming exponent of 1.5, consistent with studies of 3-dimensional aging soft matter, was observed. This study brings into question the influence of dimensionality on jammed systems and provides evidence supporting a higher universality of jamming.
Leandra would like to thank all of her colleagues and collaborators at UC San Diego and ChemMatCARS, particularly Jacob Stanley, Binhua Lin, and Mati Meron for their help.