Crystals of Na+ ions at the surface of a silica hydrosol

Abstract

I used x-ray grazing incidence diffraction to measure the spatial correlations between sodium ions adsorbed with Bjerrum's density at the surface of a monodispersed 22-nm-particle colloidal silica solution stabilized by NaOH with a total bulk concentration mol/L. My findings show that the surface compact layer is in a two-dimensional crystalline state (symmetry p2), with four ions forming the unit cell and a ~30 Angstrom translational correlation length between sodium ions.