Colloidal hard spheres: cooking and looking

In this article we highlight our recent work on the development of crosslinked core-shell polymethyl-methacrylate colloids and their application as colloidal model hard spheres for quantitative confocal microscopy. Moreover, we demonstrate that synthesizing colloids (cooking) does not only lead to the final core-shell particles, but also to "intermediate-product- particles", which are interesting in their own right and offer additional possibilities for various physical experiments (looking). In particular, we focus on the application of crosslinked latex particles as microgel particles, non-spherically shaped particles as model particles for shape-induced geometrical frustration and the final core-shell particles for the direct measurement of thermodynamic properties using quantitative real-space confocal microscopy. © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2006