Soft Interfacial Chemistry（Takiue Lab.）

The soft interface such as gas/liquid and liquid/liquid interfaces is regarded as a fundamental structure of soft matters including emulsion, vesicle, biological membrane, and thus the study on the structure and property of soft interface is crucial to understand sophisticated structure-function relation of soft matter. Our group investigates the adsorbed films (Gibbs films) of various surface active substances at soft interfaces by means of macroscopic and microscopic techniques; interfacial tensiometry, synchrotron X-ray reflection (XR), total reflection XAFS, and Brewster angle microscopy (BAM). Our goal is to elucidate the principles of “raft” formation in biological membrane from the viewpoint of “line tension”, which is an excess energy generated at the domain boundary in heterogeneous structure at the interface. Our recent activities are as follows.