Current research interests focus on dynamics and structures of phospholipid bilayer, vesicles and other assemblies. One of the projects is the study of dynamics of lipid vesicles in condensed suspensions using fluorescence microscopy.
In hard sphere colloidal suspension, as increasing volume fraction of colloids or decreasing temperature, dynamics of colloids is significantly slowed down because of "caging effect", confinement of each colloid in the "cage" formed by its neighbors. However, what will happen if the hard spheres are replaced by "sticky balls"?
The "sticky balls" we use are lipid vesicles stabilized by nanoparticles, which has been proved that both negative and positive charged nanoparticles can stabilize liposomes even when the volume fraction of liposomes is increased to ~70%. Quite differently from hard-sphere systems, the lipid vesicles with flexible membranes behave in an inelastic manner when they are confined in the "cages". More significantly, the dynamics of condensed liposomes shows interesting heterogeneities.
