English

Reentrant glass transition in a colloid-polymer mixture with depletion attractions

Soft Condensed Matter 2009-11-07 v1 Disordered Systems and Neural Networks

Abstract

Performing light scattering experiments we show that introducing short-ranged attraction to a colloidal suspension of nearly hard spheres by addition of free polymer produces new glass transition phenomena. We observe a dramatic acceleration of the density fluctuations amounting to the melting of a colloidal glass. Increasing the strength of the attractions the system freezes into another nonergodic state sharing some qualitative features with gel states occurring at lower colloid packing fractions. This reentrant glass transition is in qualitative agreement with recent theoretical predictions.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0203513,
  title  = {Reentrant glass transition in a colloid-polymer mixture with depletion attractions},
  author = {Thomas Eckert and Eckhard Bartsch},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0203513},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

14 pages, 3 figures