Onset of anomalous diffusion in colloids confined to quasimonolayers.

Abstract

It has been recently shown that a colloidal monolayer, e.g., formed at a fluid interface or by means of a suitable confining potential, exhibits anomalous collective diffusion. This is a consequence of the hydrodynamic interactions mediated by the three-dimensional (3D) ambient fluid when the particles are confined to reside on a two-dimensional (2D) manifold. We study theoretically and with numerical simulations the crossover from normal to anomalous diffusion as the particles are, in real systems, confined by a 3D external potential and thus have the possibility to fluctuate out of the 2D manifold, thus forming a quasimonolayer.