Rotational and translational drags of a Janus particle close to a wall and a lipid membrane

Abstract

Hypothesis: Measuring rotational and translational Brownian motion of single spherical particles reveals dissipations due to the interaction between the particle and the environment. Experiments: In this article, we show experiments where the in-plane translational and two rotational drag coefficients of a single spherical Brownian particle can be measured. These particle drags are functions of the particle size and the particle-wall distance, and of the viscous dissipations at play. We measure drag coefficients for Janus particles close to a solid wall and close to a lipid bilayer membrane. Findings: For a particle close to wall, we show that according to hydrodynamic models, particlewall distance and particle size can be determined. For a particle partially wrapped by lipid membranes, in absence of strong binding interactions, translational and rotational drags are significantly larger than the ones of non-wrapped particles. Beside the effect of the membrane viscosity, we show that dissipations in the deformed membrane cap region strongly contribute to the drag coefficients.