Related papers: Dynamics and structure of an aging binary colloida…

As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…

Colloidal gels undergo a phenomenon known as physical aging, i.e., a continuous change of their physical properties with time after the gel point. To date, most of the research effort on aging in gels has been focused on suspensions of hard…

Vapour deposition can directly produce ultrastable glasses, which are similar to conventional glasses aged over thousands of years. The highly mobile surface layer is believed to accelerate the ageing process of vapour-deposited glasses,…

Recent experiments and simulations have revealed glassy features in the cytoplasm, living tissues as well as dense assemblies of self propelled colloids. This leads to a fundamental question: how do these non-equilibrium (active) amorphous…

The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…

The dynamics of a glass-forming material slow greatly near the glass transition, and molecular motion becomes inhibited. We use confocal microscopy to investigate the motion of colloidal particles near the colloidal glass transition. As the…

Particle dynamics in supercooled liquids are often dominated by string-like motions in which lines of particles perform activated hops cooperatively. The structural features triggering these motions, crucial in understanding glassy…

Despite their technological relevance, a full microscopic understanding of glasses is still lacking. This applies even more to their surfaces whose properties largely differ from that of the bulk material. Here, we experimentally…

We study a dense colloidal suspension confined between two quasiparallel glass plates as a model system for a supercooled liquid in confined geometries. We directly observe the three-dimensional Brownian motion of the colloidal particles…

Diverse processes -- e.g., environmental pollution, groundwater remediation, oil recovery, filtration, and drug delivery -- involve the transport of colloidal particles in porous media. Using confocal microscopy, we directly visualize this…

We simulate binary soft disk systems in two dimensions, and investigate how the dynamics slow as the area fraction is increased toward the glass transition. The "fragility" quantifies how sensitively the relaxation time scale depends on the…

We examine the organization and dynamics of binary colloidal monolayers composed of micron-scale silica particles interspersed with smaller-diameter silica particles that serve as minority component impurities. These binary monolayers are…

We analyze data from confocal microscopy experiments of a colloidal suspension to validate predictions of rapid sporadic events responsible for structural relaxation in a glassy sample. The trajectories of several thousand colloidal…

The glassy state is known to undergo slow structural relaxation, where the system progressively explores lower free-energy minima which are either amorphous (ageing) or crystalline (devitrification). Recently, there is growing interest in…

We show numerically that a three-dimensional model for structural glass displays aging, rejuvenation and memory effects when submitted to a temperature cycle. These effects indicate that the free energy landscape of structural glasses may…

Understanding and controlling physical aging, i.e. the spontaneous temporal evolution of out-of-equilibrium systems, represents one of the greatest tasks in material science. Recent studies have revealed the existence of a complex atomic…

We consider a simple model of a structural glass, represented by a lattice gas with kinetic constraints in contact with a particle reservoir. Quench below the glass transition is represented by the jump of the chemical potential above a…

The aging dynamics of colloidal suspensions of Laponite, a synthetic clay, is investigated using dynamic light stattering (DLS) and viscometry after a quench into the glassy phase. DLS allows to follow the diffusion of Laponite particles…

Glasses are structurally liquid-like, but mechanically solid-like. Most attempts to understand glasses start from liquid state theory. Here we take the opposite point of view, and use concepts from solid state physics. We determine the…

Using fast confocal microscopy we image the three-dimensional dynamics of particles in a yielded hard-sphere colloidal glass under steady shear. The structural relaxation, observed in regions with uniform shear, is nearly isotropic but is…