Abstract

Progress in our understanding of colloidal suspensions has been limited to very dilute systems because the suspended particles scatter light strongly. Recently, a number of researchers developed and applied a new spectroscopy to study the properties of dense colloidal suspensions which multiply scatter light.^1–3 This method, called diffusing-wave spectroscopy (DWS), exploits the diffusive nature of light transport in strongly scattering media to relate temporal intensity fluctuations of the scattered light to average particle motion. In contrast to traditional quasielastic light scattering methods,⁴ DWS probes particle motion in dense strongly scattering colloids and over length scales much shorter than the wavelength of light (<10 Å).

© 1990 Optical Society of America