Probing slow fluctuations in nonergodic systems: Interleaved sampling technique

Abstract

We present a new dynamic light scattering scheme to obtain ensemble-averaged correlation functions of slow fluctuations in non-ergodic systems in an efficient way. On a rotating sample, a large set of separate correlation functions is measured in parallel, for each independent orientational component of the sample’ density fluctuations. The ensemble-averaged correlation function spans a lag time range from 1 to 10⁴ s. We describe our first implementation of this technique, discuss its statistical accuracy and show first results. Compared to plain ensemble averaging over a series of N measurements, the total measurement time is usualy reduced by a factor N without significant degradation of statistical accuracy.