Soft matter, a class of materials including polymers, colloids, and surfactant molecules, are ubiquitous in our everyday lives. Plastics, soaps, foods and living organisms are mostly comprised of soft materials. Research conducted to understand soft matter behavior at the molecular level is essential to create new materials with unique properties. Self-healing plastics, targeted drug delivery, and nanowire assemblies have all been further advanced by soft matter research. The author of this dissertation investigates fundamental soft matter systems, including polymer solutions and melts, colloid dispersions in polymer melts, and interfacial fluids.;The dynamics of polymers and confined fluids were studied using the single-molecule sensitive technique of fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). Here, fluorescent dyes are attached to polymer coils or by introducing free dyes directly into the solution/film. Complementary experiments were also performed, utilizing atomic force microscopy (AFM) and ellipsometry.;FCS and AFM experiments demonstrated the significant difference in properties of thin fluid films of the nearly spherical, nonpolar molecule TEHOS (tetrakis(2-ethylhexoxy)silane) when compared to its bulk counterpart. AFM experiments confirmed TEHOS orders in layers near a solid substrate. FCS experiments show that free dyes introduced in these thin films do not have a single diffusion coefficient, indicating that these films have heterogeneity at the molecular level.;FCS experiments have been applied to study the diffusion of gold colloids. The diffusion of gold colloids in polymer melts was found to dramatically depart from the Stokes-Einstein prediction when colloid size was smaller than the surrounding polymer mesh size. This effect is explained by noting the viscosity experienced by the colloid is not equivalent to the overall bulk viscosity of the polymer melt.;The conformational change of polymers immersed in a binary solvent was measured via FCS. This experiment was conducted to test a theory proposed by Brochard and de Gennes, who postulated a polymer chain undergoes a collapse and a dramatic re-swelling as the critical point of the binary mixture is approached. Measuring polymer chain diffusion as a function of temperature, this theory was confirmed. To my knowledge, this was the first experimental evidence of contraction/re-swelling for polymers in critical binary solvents.
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