Related papers: Dynamics and structure of an aging binary colloida…
Formation of monodispersed colloidal particles is a complex process: nuclei, produced rapidly in a supersaturated solution, grow to nanosize primary particles, which then aggregate (coagulate) to form much larger final colloids. This paper…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
It is well established that glassy materials can undergo aging, i.e., their properties gradually change over time. There is rapidly growing evidence that dense active and living systems also exhibit many features of glassy behavior, but it…
Glasses and gels, widely encountered amorphous solids with diverse industrial and everyday applications, share intriguing similarities such as rigidity without crystalline order and dynamic slowing down during aging. However, the underlying…
Colloidal suspensions are simple model systems for the study of phase transitions. Video microscopy is capable of directly imaging the structure and dynamics of colloidal suspensions in different phases. Recent results related to…
Gels in soft-matter systems are an important nonergodic state of matter. We study a colloid-polymer mixture which is quenched by increasing the polymer concentration, from a fluid to a gel. Using confocal microscopy, we study both the…
We examine the dynamics of two-dimensional colloidal systems using numerical simulations of a system with a drive applied to a thin region in the middle of the sample to produce a local shear. For a monodisperse colloidal assembly, we find…
The ordering of particles in the drying process of a colloidal suspension is crucial in determining the properties of the resulting film. For example, microscopic inhomogeneities can lead to the formation of cracks and defects that can…
Using confocal-microscopy we investigate the structure of binary mixtures of colloidal hard spheres with size ratio q=0.61. As a function of the packing fraction of the two particle species, we observe a marked change of the dominant…
The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal,…
We review the most striking experimental results on aging in a variety of disordered systems, which reveal similar features but also important differences. We argue that a generic model that reproduce many of these features is that of {\it…
We investigate how cyclic loading evolves the structure and deformation behaviors of a granular raft composed of particles floating at an air-oil interface. The raft has a disordered particle packing structure, and is cohesive due to…
We present molecular dynamics simulations of a binary Lennard-Jones mixture at temperatures below the kinetic glass transition. The ``mobility'' of a particle is characterized by the amplitude of its fluctuation around its average position.…
We use X-Ray Photon Correlation Spectroscopy to investigate the structural relaxation process in a metallic glass on the atomic length scale. We report evidence for a dynamical crossover between the supercooled liquid phase and the…
Understanding the structural origins of glass formation and mechanical response remains a central challenge in condensed matter physics. Recent studies have identified the local caging potential experienced by a particle due to its nearest…
We explore the glassy dynamics of soft colloids using microgels and charged particles interacting by steric and screened Coulomb interactions, respectively. In the supercooled regime, the structural relaxation time $\tau_\alpha$ of both…
The evolution of an initially prepared distribution of micron sized colloidal particles, trapped at a fluid interface and under the action of their mutual capillary attraction, is analyzed by using Brownian dynamics simulations. At a…
Apart from not having crystallized, supercooled liquids can be considered as being properly equilibrated and thus can be described by a few thermodynamic control variables. In contrast, glasses and other amorphous solids can be arbitrarily…
We conduct a numerical study of the dynamical behavior of a system of three-dimensional crosses, particles that consist of three mutually perpendicular line segments rigidly joined at their midpoints. In an earlier study [W. van Ketel et…
We study experimentally the origin of heterogeneous dynamics in strongly driven glass-forming systems. Thereto, we apply a well-defined force with a laser line trap on individual colloidal polystyrene probe particles seeded in an emulsion…