Related papers: Equilibrium route to colloidal gellation: mixtures…
The dynamical arrest of attractive colloidal particles into out-of-equilibrium structures, known as gelation, is central to biophysics, materials science, nanotechnology, and food and cosmetic applications, but a complete understanding is…
Colloid-polymer mixtures can undergo spinodal decomposition into colloid-rich and colloid-poor regions. Gelation results when interconnected colloid-rich regions solidify. We show that this occurs when these regions undergo a glass…
We attempt a classification of different colloidal gels based on colloid-colloid interactions. We discriminate primarily between non-equilibrium and equilibrium routes to gelation, the former case being slaved to thermodynamic phase…
By means of classical density functional theory and its dynamical extension, we consider a colloidal fluid with spherically-symmetric competing interactions, which are well known to exhibit a rich bulk phase behavior. This includes complex…
We systematically study the relationship between equilibrium and non-equilibrium phase diagrams of a system of short-ranged attractive colloids. Using Monte Carlo and Brownian dynamics simulations we find a window of enhanced…
We study the equilibrium phase diagram of binary mixtures of hard spheres as well as of parallel hard cubes. A superior cluster algorithm allows us to establish and to access the demixed phase for both systems and to investigate the subtle…
Using computer simulations, we study the dynamic arrest in a schematic model of colloid-polymer mixtures combining short-ranged attractions with long-ranged repulsions. The arrested gel is a dilute rigid network of colloidal particles…
The competition of depletion attractions and longer-ranged repulsions between colloidal particles in colloid-polymer mixtures leads to the formation of heterogeneous gel-like structures. For instance, gel networks, i.e., states where the…
A mixture of hard-sphere particles and model emulsion droplets is studied with a Brownian dynamics simulation. We find that the addition of nonwetting emulsion droplets to a suspension of pure hard spheres can lead to both gas-liquid and…
Differences in activities in colloidal particles are sufficient to drive phase separation between active and passive (or less active) particles, even if they have only excluded volume interactions. In this paper, we study the phase…
We use molecular dynamics simulations of a simple model to show that dispersions of slightly elongated colloidal particles with long-range dipolar interactions, like ferrofluids, can form a physical (reversible) gel at low volume fractions.…
We study the thermodynamic behavior of nonpolar liquid mixtures in the vicinity of curved charged objects, such as electrodes or charged colloids. For small enough charge on the object, or equivalently, small potential, the…
Colloid-polymer mixtures may undergo either fluid-fluid phase separation or gelation. This depends on the depth of the quench (polymer concentration) and polymer-colloid size ratio. We present a real-space study of dynamics in phase…
We review recent work on the phase behaviour of binary charged sphere mixtures as a function of particle concentration and composition. Both size ratios and charge ratios are varied over a wide range. By contrast to hard spheres the long…
Phase diagrams of binary mixtures of oppositely charged colloids are calculated theoretically. The proposed mean-field-like formalism interpolates between the limits of a hard-sphere system at high temperatures and the colloidal crystals…
We propose that the behavior of asymmetric binary fluid mixtures with a large class of attractive or repulsive interparticle interactions can be understood by mapping onto effective non-additive hard-sphere models. The latter are best…
Using computer simulations, we identify the mechanisms causing aggregation and structural arrest of colloidal suspensions interacting with a short-ranged attraction at moderate and high densities. Two different non-ergodicity transitions…
Dynamical heterogeneities in a colloidal fluid close to gelation are studied by means of computer simulations. A clear distinction between some fast particles and the rest, slow ones, is observed, yielding a picture of the gel composed by…
We investigate bridging and aggregation of two colloidal particles in a near-critical binary mixture when the fluid far from the particles is outside the coexistence (CX) curve and is rich in the component disfavored by the colloid…
Purely entropic systems such as suspensions of hard rods, platelets and spheres show rich phase behavior. Rods and platelets have successfully been used as models to predict the equilibrium properties of liquid crystals for several decades.…