Hydrodynamic interactions induce anomalous diffusion under partial confinement

Abstract

Under partial confinement, the motion of colloidal particles is restricted to a plane but their dynamics is influenced by hydrodynamic interactions mediated by the unconfined, three--dimensional flow of the embedding fluid. We demonstrate that this dimensionality mismatch induces a characteristic divergence in the two--dimensional collective diffusion coefficient of the colloidal monolayer. This result, independent from the specific interparticle forces in the monolayer, is solely due to the kinematical constraint on the colloidal particles, and it is different from the known divergence of transport coefficients in purely two--dimensional fluids.