Jason Merrill

We have extended a sensitive probe of colloidal interparticle forces, blinking optical tweezers, to allow measurements of forces among groups of more than two particles. This dissertation focuses on bridging the gap between microscopic pair interactions and bulk behavior in colloidal systems by using this technique to explore the regime of few-body interactions between micron-size polymer beads suspended in oil. Electrostatic forces and each component of the mobility tensor of small groups of colloidal particles are simultaneously measured using blinking optical tweezers. When the electrostatic screening length is longer than the inter-particle separation, forces are found to be non-pairwise additive. Both pair and multi-particle forces are well described by the linearized Poisson-Boltzmann equation with constant potential boundary conditions. These findings may play an important role in understanding the structure and stability of a wide variety of systems, from micron-sized particles in oil to aqueous nanocolloids. The measurement technique presented here should be simple to further extend to systems of heterogeneous, non-spherical particles arranged in arbitrary three dimensional geometries.