Related papers: Crystallization and gelation in colloidal systems …
Concentrated colloidal suspensions are a well-tested model system which has a glass transition. Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high; the…
We report on a novel and flexible experiment to investigate the non-equilibrium melting behaviour of model crystals made from charged colloidal spheres. In a slit geometry polycrystalline material formed in a low salt region is driven by…
Soft-granular media, such as dense emulsions, foams or tissues, exhibit either fluid- or solid-like properties depending on the applied external stresses. Whereas bulk rheology of such materials has been thoroughly investigated, the…
Nucleation in systems with a metastable liquid-gas critical point is the prototypical example of a two-step nucleation process, in which the appearance of the critical nucleus is preceded by the formation of a liquid-like density…
Understanding the mechanism of nucleation of the stable phase inside the metastable parent phase during a first order phase transition has been a subject of outstanding interest in natural science. The problem becomes even more challenging…
The intricate interplay between colloidal particle shape and precisely engineered interaction potentials has paved the way for the discovery of unprecedented crystal structures in both two and three dimensions. Here, we make use of…
Liquids in systems with spherically symmetric interactions are not thermodynamically stable when the range of the attraction is reduced sufficiently. However, these metastable liquids have lifetimes long enough that they are readily…
Steady state dynamics of clustering, long range order, and inelastic collapse are experimentally observed in vertically shaken granular monolayers. At large vibration amplitudes, particle correlations show only short range order like…
Using video-microscopy imaging we demonstrate the existence of a short-ranged equilibrium attraction between heavy silica colloids diffusing on soft surfaces of cross-linked polymer gels. The inter-colloid potential can be tuned by changing…
We study the nucleation of crystalline cluster phases in the generalized exponential model with exponent n=4. Due to the finite value of this pair potential for zero separation, at high densities the system forms cluster crystals with…
The theory of elastic interaction of micron size axially symmetric colloidal particles immersed into confined nematic liquid crystal has been proposed. General formulas are obtained for the self energy of one colloidal particle and…
We numerically investigate slow dynamics of a binary mixture of ultrasoft particles interacting with the generalized Hertzian potential. If the softness parameter, $\alpha$, is small, the particles at high densities start penetrating each…
Mode-coupling theory (MCT) predicts arrest of colloids in terms of their volume fraction, and the range and depth of the interparticle attraction. We discuss how effective values of these parameters evolve under cluster aggregation. We…
We study the effects of long range interactions on the phases observed in cohesive granular materials. At high vibration amplitudes, a gas of magnetized particles is observed with velocity distributions similar to non-magnetized particles.…
Bottom-up assembly of nanocrystals (NCs) into ordered arrays, or superlattices (SLs), is a promising route to design materials with new functionalities, but the degree of control over assembly into functional structures remains challenging.…
The settling of colloidal particles with short-ranged attractions is investigated via highly resolved immersed boundary simulations. At modest volume fractions, we show that inter-colloid attractions lead to clustering that reduces the…
We report the observation of the homogenous nucleation of crystals in a dense layer of steel spheres confined between two horizontal plates vibrated vertically. Above a critical vibration amplitude, two-layer crystals with square symmetry…
The stability of organic solar cells is strongly affected by the morphology of the photoactive layers, whose separated crystalline and/or amorphous phases are kinetically quenched far from their thermodynamic equilibrium during the…
We consider the sedimentation of a colloidal gel under confinement in the direction of gravity. The confinement allows us to compare directly experiments and computer simulations, for the same system size in the vertical direction. The…
We study the phase diagram of a two-dimensional assembly of bosons interacting via a soft core repulsive pair potential of varying strength, and compare it to that of the equivalent system in which particles are regarded as distinguishable.…