Related papers: On measuring colloidal volume fractions
Although in the case of polymer solutions the existence of hydrodynamic screening is considered as established, use of the same methods for suspensions of hard spheres so far have failed to produce similar results. In this work we…
We simulate the dynamics of polydisperse hard spheres at high packing fractions, $\phi$, with an experimentally-realistic particle size distribution (PSD) and other commonly-used PSDs such as gaussian or top hat. We find that the mode of…
We report a Monte Carlo simulation study of the properties of highly asymmetric binary hard sphere mixtures. This system is treated within an effective fluid approximation in which the large particles interact through a depletion potential…
We study theoretically and numerically the microscopic cause of the mechanical stability of hard sphere glasses near their maximum packing. We show that, after coarse-graining over time, the hard sphere interaction can be described by an…
We study theoretically and numerically the elastic properties of hard sphere glasses, and provide a real-space description of their mechanical stability. In contrast to repulsive particles at zero-temperature, we argue that the presence of…
The properties of liquid dispersions, such as foams or emulsions, depend strongly on the volume fraction $\phi$ of the continuous phase. Concentrating on the example of foams, we show experimentally and theoretically that $\phi$ may be…
The standard model of classical Density Functional Theory for pair potentials consists of a hard-sphere functional plus a mean-field term accounting for long ranged attraction. However, most implementations using sophisticated Fundamental…
Motivated by the relation between particle shape and packing, we measure the volume fraction $\phi$ occupied by the Platonic solids which are a class of polyhedron with congruent sides, vertices and dihedral angles. Tetrahedron, cube,…
We develop a cavity-based method which allows to extract thermodynamic properties from position information in hard-sphere/disk systems. So far, there are 'available-volume' and 'free-volume' methods. We add a third one, which we call…
We study the impact between a plate and a drop of non-colloidal solid particles suspended in a Newtonian liquid, with a specific attention to the case when the particle volume fraction, $\phi$, is close to - or even exceeds - the critical…
Thermoresponsive poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) particles of a nearly constant swelling ratio and with polydispersity indices (PDIs) varying over a wide range (7.4% - 48.9%) are synthesized to study the effects of polydispersity on…
We have carried out molecular dynamics simulations of the crystallization of hard spheres modelling colloidal systems that are studied in conventional and space-based experiments. We use microscopic probes to investigate the effects of…
We use confocal microscopy to study the motion of a magnetic bead in a dense colloidal suspension, near the colloidal glass transition volume fraction $\phi_g$. For dense liquid-like samples near $\phi_g$, below a threshold force the…
There exists a variety of theories of the glass transition and many more numerical models. But because the models need built-in complexity to prevent crystallization, comparisons with theory can be difficult. We study the dynamics of a…
We determine the long-time self-diffusion coefficient and sedimentation coefficient for suspensions of nanoparticles with anisotropic shapes (octahedra, cubes, tetrahedra, and spherocylinders) as a function of nanoparticle concentration…
We study suspensions of deformable (viscoelastic) spheres in a Newtonian solvent in plane Couette geometry, by means of direct numerical simulations. We find that in the limit of vanishing inertia the effective viscosity $\mu$ of the…
We show that an analogy between crowding in fluid and jammed phases of hard spheres captures the density dependence of the kissing number for a family of numerically generated jammed states. We extend this analogy to jams of mixtures of…
We link the thermodynamics of colloidal suspensions to the statistics of regular and random packings. Random close packing has defied a rigorous definition yet, in three dimensions, there is near universal agreement on the volume fraction…
The fundamental measure approach to classical density functional theory has been shown to be a powerful tool to predict various thermodynamic properties of hard-sphere systems. We employ this approach to determine not only one-particle…
While hard-sphere models form the foundation of theoretical condensed matter physics, real systems often exhibit some degree of softness. We present a theoretical and numerical study of a class of nearly hard-sphere systems, generalized…