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Luminescent and absorptive metal-coated emulsions for micro-velocimetry

Fluorescent latex beads have been widely used as tracers in microfluidics over for the last decades. They have the advantages to be density matched with water and to be easily localizable using fluorescence microscopy. We have recently synthesized silver-coated oil droplets that are both luminescent and absorptive, by first coating the oil interface with a polydopamine layer and then depositing a silver layer by a redox process. They have a mean diameter of 6 μm and a their density has been matched to the density of water by adjusting the thickness of the metallic layer. In this work we used these particles as tracers to measure the velocity profile of a water flow in a PDMS microchannel with a rectangular cross-section, which allowed us to confirm the predictions of the Stokes equation with results comparable to those of common submicronic polystyrene particles.