| Colloidal science is of tremendous importance in the advancement of science and technology and improvement of people's life quality. Investigating the surface properties of the colloidal particles is of enormous interests. However, the conventional methods (summarized in chapter 1) to study colloidal particles either is lack of surface specificity or is perturbing and invasive. Second harmonic generation (SHG) as a surface specific nonlinear optical technique is a powerful and versatile tool to study various surfaces and surface dynamics but was only limited to investigating planar surfaces in the past.;In this dissertation study, the application of SHG is extended to the colloidal particle surfaces. A series of studies have been carried out to demonstrate that SHG technique is applicable to study the surface properties and surface processes of various colloidal particle systems. The colloidal systems have been studied in this dissertation include polymer latex particles, oil-in-water emulsions, semiconductor colloidal particles, and liposomes. New analytical methods have been developed for the SHG colloidal particle surface study, and valuable information of the surface processes has been obtained, including the adsorption equilibrium (chapter 2, 3, 4, 7), the surface spectroscopy (chapter 4), electrostatic properties of the charged particles (chapter 5, 6), the molecular transport across liposome bilayers (chapter 7, 8), and the kinetics of molecular transfer between particles (chapter 3). |
