The interaction of light with matter strongly depends on the structure of the latter at wavelength scale. Ordered systems interact with light via collective modes, giving rise to diffraction. In contrast, completely disordered systems are dominated by Mie resonances of individual particles and random scattering. However, less clear is the transition regime in between these two extremes, where d...

Active Brownian particles are capable of taking up energy from their environment and converting it into directed motion; examples range from chemotactic cells and bacteria to artificial micro-swimmers. We have recently demonstrated that Janus particles, i.e. gold-capped colloidal spheres, suspended in a critical binary liquid mixture perform active Brownian motion when illuminated by light. In...

Herein we demonstrate how the volatility of a liquid can be manipulated by enclosing microdroplets of the liquid into thin polymeric shells. In this way, composite core-shell microparticles consisting of 80 wt% of a liquid core material and 20 wt% of a polymer can be made 150 °C more stable than the individual core component. The thermal stability of the composite microparticles is found to be ...

The size distribution of semitransparent irregularly shaped mineral dust aerosol samples is determined using a commonly used laser particle-sizing technique. The size distribution is derived from intensity measurements of singly scattered light at various scattering angles close to the forward-scattering direction at a wavelength of 632.8 nm. We analyze the results based on various light-scatte...

We invert the Fredholm equation representing the light scattered by a single spherical particle or a distribution of spherical particles to obtain the particle size distribution function and refractive index. We obtain the solution by expanding the distribution function as a linear combination of a set of orthonormal basis functions. The set of orthonormal basis functions is composed of Schmidt...

To develop an active microbial activity quickly developing stabilizing thermophilic temperatures during the composting of wastewater sludge, the bulking agent (BA) plays a major role in establishing the recipe structure, exposed particle surface area and porosity. To optimize the biodegradation of a sludge compost recipe, the objective of this paper was to study the effect and interaction of in...

Rubberwood (Hevea brasiliensis), a potential raw material for bioethanol production due to its high cellulose content, was used as a novel feedstock for enzymatic hydrolysis and bioethanol production using biological pretreatment. To improve ethanol production, rubberwood was pretreated with white rot fungus Ceriporiopsis subvermispora to increase fermentation efficiency. The effects of particl...

We present the development of a semi-analytical algorithm for optical particle sizing in disperse media. The algorithm is applied to the specific case of water clouds. However, it can be extended with minor modifications to other types of light-scattering medium. It is assumed that the optical thickness tau of the medium is large and the probability of photon absorption beta is small. Thus the ...

Small particles (<10  μm) are often considered to play the dominant role in controlling scattering and absorption due to their relatively large numbers, which are typically found in the ocean. Here we present an approach for quantifying the size range of particles that contribute significantly to bulk inherent optical properties. We present a numerical assessment of the variability in optically...

In the open ocean, many animals are highly transparent, some achieving near invisibility. However, little is known about how this transparency is attained. The effects of cellular ultrastructure on tissue transparency were mathematically modeled. Given a specific constant volume or surface area of a higher refractive index material (e.g. protein, lipid, etc.), within a lower refractive index cy...