We study the correlated Brownian motion of micron-sized particles suspended in water and confined between two plates. The hydrodynamic interaction between the particles exhibits three anomalies. (i) The transverse coupling is negative; i.e., particles exert "antidrag" on one another when moving perpendicular to their connecting line. (ii) The interaction decays with interparticle distance r as 1/r(2), faster than in unconfined suspensions but slower than near a single wall. (iii) At large distances, the pair interaction is independent of concentration within the experimental accuracy. The confined suspension thus provides an unusual example of long-range, yet essentially pairwise, correlations even at high concentration. These effects are shown to arise from the two-dimensional dipolar form of the flow induced by single-particle motion.

We extend the Saffman theory of membrane hydrodynamics to account for the correlated motion of membrane proteins, along with the effect of protein concentration on that correlation and on the response of the membrane to stresses. Expressions for the coupling diffusion coefficients of protein pairs and their concentration dependence are derived in the limit of small protein size relative to the interprotein separation. The additional role of membrane viscosity as determining the characteristic length scale for membrane response leads to unusual concentration effects at large separation-the transverse coupling increases with protein concentration, whereas the longitudinal one becomes concentration-independent.

We present a theory for the kinetics of surfactant adsorption at the interface between an aqueous solution and another fluid (air, oil) phase. The model relies on a free-energy formulation. It describes both the diffusive transport of surfactant molecules from the bulk solution to the interface, and the kinetics taking place at the interface itself. When applied to non-ionic surfactant systems, the theory recovers results of previous models, justify their assumptions and predicts a diffusion-limited adsorption, in accord with experiments. For salt-free ionic surfactant solutions, electrostatic interactions are shown to drastically affect the kinetics. The adsorption in this case is predicted to be kinetically limited, and the theory accounts for unusual experimental results obtained recently for the dynamic surface tension of such systems. Addition of salt to an ionic surfactant solution leads to screening of the electrostatic interactions and to a diffusion-limited adsorption. In addition, the free-energy formulation offers a general method for relating the dynamic surface tension to surface coverage. Unlike previous models, it does not rely on equilibrium relations which are shown in some cases to be invalid out of equilibrium.

We report an experimental study of diffusion in a quasi-one-dimensional (q1D) colloid suspension which behaves like a Tonks gas. The mean squared displacement as a function of time is described well with an ansatz encompassing a time regime that is both shorter and longer than the mean time between collisions. The ansatz asserts that the inverse mean squared displacement is the sum of the inverse mean squared displacement for short time normal diffusion (random walk) and the inverse mean squared displacement for asymptotic single-file diffusion (SFD). The dependence of the 1D mobility in the SFD on the concentration of the colloids agrees quantitatively with that derived for a hard rod model, which confirms for the first time the validity of the hard rod SFD theory. We also show that a recent SFD theory by Kollmann leads to the hard rod SFD theory for a Tonks gas.

We study experimentally and theoretically the hydrodynamic coupling between Brownian colloidal particles diffusing along a linear channel. The quasi-one-dimensional confinement, unlike other constrained geometries, leads to a sharply screened interaction. Consequently, particles move in concert only when their mutual distance is smaller than the channel width, and two-body interactions remain dominant up to high particle densities. The coupling in a cylindrical channel is predicted to reverse sign at a certain distance, yet this unusual effect is too small to be currently detectable.