Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 028303 (2008) [4 pages]Statics and Dynamics of 2D Colloidal Crystals in a Random Pinning PotentialReceived 12 February 2007; revised 17 August 2007; published 18 January 2008 We report the first experimental study of a model system of a two-dimensional colloidal crystal in a random pinning potential. The colloidal crystal consists of monodispersed charged polystyrene microspheres suspended in deionized aqueous media and confined near a rough charged surface. It is found that the static orientational correlation function g6(r) decays exponentially for intermediate and strong pinning, in agreement with theories. The driven depinning is dominated by thermally activated creep motion along 1D-like channels between regions with short-range order. A coexistence model is proposed for describing the observations. © 2008 The American Physical Society URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.028303
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.028303
PACS:
82.70.Dd, 64.60.Ht, 83.50.Ha
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