Shearing or compressing a soft glass in 2D: time-concentration superposition

We report surface shear rheological measurements on dense insoluble monolayers of micron sized colloidal spheres at the oil/water interface and of the protein beta-lactoglobulin at the air/water surface. As expected, the elastic modulus shows a changing character in the response, from a viscous liquid towards an elastic solid as the concentration is increased, and a change from elastic to viscous as the shear frequency is increased. Surprisingly, above a critical packing fraction, the complex elastic modulus curves measured at different concentrations can be superposed to form a master curve. This provides a powerful tool for the extrapolation of the material response function outside the experimentally accessible frequency range. The results are discussed in relation to recent experiments on bulk systems, and indicate that these two-dimensional monolayers should be regarded as being close to a soft glass state.