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Title: Beyond Wrinkling: Stress Relaxation in Lung Surfactant Monolayers and Other Thin Films

Speaker: Ka Yee Lee, University of Chicago

Abstract: Surfactants at air/water interfaces are often subjected to mechanical stresses as the interfaces they occupy are reduced in area. For lung surfactants during exhalation, the monolayer collapse manifests itself as protrusions of folds into the subphase. These folds remain attached to the monolayer and reversibly reincorporated upon expansion (inhalation). This folding transition in monolayers is not limited to lung surfactant films, but rather represents a much more general type of stress relaxation mechanism. Collapse modes are found most closely linked to in-plane rigidity. We characterize the rigidity of the monolayer by analyzing in-plane morphology on numerous length scales. More rigid monolayers collapse out-of-plane via a hard elastic mode similar to an elastic membrane, with the folded state being the final collapse state, while softer monolayers relax in-plane by shearing. For the hard elastic mode of collapse, we have further demonstrated experimentally and theoretically that the folded state is preceded by a wrinkled state, and similar wrinkle to fold transitions has been observed in elastic thin films ranging from 2 nm to 10 μm in thickness of completely different chemical nature (lung surfactant lipid monolayers, gold nanoparticle trilayers, and polyester sheets).

Host: Dutta

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Keywords: Physics, Astronomy, colloquium