Date of Award

5-2020

Document Type

Thesis campus only

Department

Physics

First Advisor

Orrin Shindell

Second Advisor

Kelvin Cheng

Third Advisor

Nirav Mehta

Abstract

In this paper a new experimental setup for analyzing the glass phenomenon in two dimensions is presented. Each component of the setup is discussed, as well as some relevant background on glasses, lipid bilayers and vesicles, resolution, and total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy. The experimental protocol is then discussed with specific focus on vesicle formation and filtering, bilayer formation, and glass cleaning. Each prepared sample of small unilamelar vesicles adhered to a supported lipid bilayer was captured for two thousand frames and these frames were analyzed with the Trackpy particle tracking package for Python in order to find the ensemble mean squared displacement of each sample. This was used to determine the viscosity, with a measured viscosity of 4.04 Pa s for a 0.2% biotin surface, and 7.18 Pa s for a 0.5% biotin surface. Finally, possible directions for future work are given.

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