Related papers: Glassy dynamics and dynamical heterogeneity in col…
We investigate how structural relaxation in mixtures with strong dynamical asymmetry is affected by the microscopic dynamics. Brownian and Newtonian dynamics simulations of dense mixtures of fast and slow hard spheres reveal a striking…
Dating from experiments more than 20 years ago, it has been realized that the crystallization of hard colloidal particles in the vicinity of dynamical arrest has several anomalies, that render the conventional nucleation and growth model…
Dynamic processes in dispersions of charged spherical particles are of importance both in fundamental science, and in technical and bio-medical applications. There exists a large variety of charged-particles systems, ranging from…
We developed a generalized replicated liquid theory for glassy phases of non-spherical uniaxial molecules and colloids, which becomes exact in the large dimensional limit $d\to\infty$. We then applied the scheme to patchy colloids with…
We have performed confocal microscopy experiments and computer simulations of colloidal suspensions with moderate volume fraction confined between two quasi-parallel, rough walls [A. Villada-Balbuena et al., Soft Matter, 2022, 18,…
In supercooled liquids, vitrification generally suppresses crystallization. Yet some glasses can still crystallize despite the arrest of diffusive motion. This ill-understood process may limit the stability of glasses, but its microscopic…
Glasses behave as solids on experimental time scales due to their slow relaxation. Growing dynamic length scales due to cooperative motion of particles are believed to be central to this slow response. For quiescent glasses, however, the…
Melts of 3-dimensional dendritic beads-springs, namely coarse-grained soft-clusters, are studied by molecular dynamics simulations. The goal is to elucidate the unique dynamics of giant molecules, or generally speaking, 3-dimensional…
A mode-coupling theory for the slow single-particle dynamics in fluids adsorbed in disordered porous media is derived, which complements previous work on the collective dynamics [V. Krakoviack, Phys. Rev. E 75, 031503 (2007)]. Its…
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…
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…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
Supercooled liquids exhibit spatial heterogeneity in the dynamics of their fluctuating atomic arrangements. The length and time scales of the heterogeneous dynamics are central to the glass transition and influence nucleation and growth of…
We report on the differences between colloidal systems left to evolve in the earth's gravitational field and the same systems for which a slow continuous rotation averaged out the effects of particle sedimentation on a distance scale small…
A simple model of an active colloid consisting of dumbbell-shaped particles that cyclically change their length without propelling themselves is proposed and analyzed. At nanoscales, it represents an idealization for bacterial cytoplasm or…
We investigate the structure and dynamics of a hard colloid-star polymer mixture in the range of its arrested phase separation, where an incipient demixing transition is interfering with a nearby vitrification line, focusing on the protein…
We will review some of the theoretical progresses that have been recently done in the study of slow dynamics of glassy systems: the general techniques used for studying the dynamics in the mean field approximation and the emergence of a…
The transient behaviour of highly concentrated colloidal liquids and dynamically arrested states (glasses) under time-dependent shear is reviewed. This includes both theoretical and experimental studies and comprises the macroscopic…
The far-from-equilibrium dynamics of glassy systems share important phenomenological traits. A transition is generally observed from a time-homogeneous dynamical regime to an aging regime where physical changes occur intermittently and, on…
In the free energy landscape picture of glassy systems, the slow dynamics characteristic of these systems is believed to be due to the existence of a complicated free-energy landscape with many local minima. We show here that for a…