Going back a very long way, the late Toyoichi Tanaka did several early papers with iirc Benedek and Hocker. The citation trail will lead forward from there.
You need a gel that is water-white. Polyacrylamide works. The core experiment is the same. My general recommendation is to filter starting material into the scattering cell and then initiate gel formation or crosslinking. Initiate? Add cross linking agent. Heat. Use UV light. There are lots of choices here; I am not a synthetic chemist. The limit on interpretation is that the concentration fluctuations involve material that cannot travel very far, because it is fixed by the cross linking.
Literature interpretation warning: Some authors refer to highly concentrated solutions especially of polymers as "gels"; the phrase 'physical gels' is sometimes also used. There is nothing wrong with this phrasing, but you want to be aware that some papers are considering different sorts of materials than are others. In addition, there are theoretical models that model physical and chemical gels as being extremely similar except on long time scales.
I can suggest the following papers:
P.N. Pusey, W. Van Megen, Dynamic light scattering by non-ergodic media, Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Volume 157, Issue 2, 1 June 1989, Pages 705-741, ISSN 0378-4371, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0378-4371(89)90063-0.
@article{PhysRevLett.84.2275,
title = {Universal Aging Features in the Restructuring of Fractal Colloidal Gels},
author = {Cipelletti, Luca and Manley, S. and Ball, R. C. and Weitz, D. A.},
journal = {Phys. Rev. Lett.},
volume = {84},
issue = {10},
pages = {2275--2278},
numpages = {0},
year = {2000},
month = {Mar},
publisher = {American Physical Society},
doi = {10.1103/PhysRevLett.84.2275},
url = {http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.84.2275}
}
Ciao, Fabrizio
I do not know if he is truly a pioneer in the field, but Shibayama made convincing evidence of what is expected to get on gelation from DLS.
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