Related papers: Sudden collapse of a colloidal gel
Rigidity percolation (RP) occurs when mechanical stability emerges in disordered networks as constraints or components are added. Here we discuss RP with structural correlations, an effect ignored in classical theories albeit relevant to…
The squeezing of soft solids, the constrained growth of biological tissues, and the swelling of soft elastic solids such as gels can generate large compressive stresses at their surfaces. This causes the otherwise smooth surface of such a…
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…
The freezing of colloidal suspensions is encountered in many natural and engineering processes. It can be harnessed through a process known as ice templating, to produce porous materials and composites exhibiting unique functional…
Typically, in quiescent conditions, attractive colloids at low volume fractions form fractal gels structured into two length scales: the colloidal and the fractal cluster scales. However when flow interfere with gelation colloidal fractal…
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…
Employing X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy we measure the kinetics and dynamics of a pressure-induced liquid-liquid phase separation (LLPS) in a water-lysozyme solution. Scattering invariants and kinetic information provide evidence…
We present experiments and simulations on cyclically sheared colloidal gels, and probe their behaviour on several different length scales. The shearing induces structural changes in the experimental gel, changing particles' neighborhoods…
A new mechanism of the collapse in hydrodynamics is suggested, due to breaking of continuously distributed vortex lines. Collapse results in formation of the point singularities of the vorticity field $|{\bf\Omega}|$. At the collapse point,…
We find the collapse of columns of granular rods to show range of behaviors that depends on particle aspect ratio (length $L$ to diameter $d$) and initial pile geometry (height/radius). For all aspect ratios $L/d$ below 24 there exists a…
We study the structure and the dynamics in the formation of irreversible gels by means of molecular dynamics simulation of a model system where the gelation transition is due to the random percolation of permanent bonds between neighboring…
We study concentrated colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition. Samples in the glassy state show aging, in that the motion of the colloidal particles slows as the sample ages from an initial state. We study the…
We use confocal microscopy to image colloidal gels formed from highly polydisperse particles. We suspend our polydisperse particles in a density matched solvent, and let the particles spontaneously aggregate through the van der Waals force.…
Spinodal demixing of systems into two phases having very different viscosities leads to viscoelastic networks, i.e. gels. Here we consider demixing in a colloidal system where one phase is a nematic liquid crystal with a strongly…
We have investigated the rheology and structure of a gel formed from a mixture of non-Brownian particles and two immiscible liquids. The suspension of particles in a liquid undergoes gelation upon the addition of a small content of second,…
We report, for the first time, some experimental observations regarding a new type of long range interaction between rigid particles that prevails when they are suspended in an soft elastic gel. A denser particle submerges itself to a…
Chiral active materials are abundant in nature, including the cytoskeleton with attached motor proteins, rotary clusters of bacteria flagella, and self-spinning starfish embryos. These materials break both time reversal and mirror-image…
We review recent experimental, numerical, and analytical results on active suspensions of self-propelled colloidal beads moving in (quasi) two dimensions. Active colloids form part of the larger theme of active matter, which is noted for…
Entangled states are ubiquitous amongst fibrous materials, whether naturally occurring (keratin, collagen, DNA) or synthetic (nanotube assemblies, elastane). A key mechanical characteristic of these systems is their ability to reorganise in…
Colloidal particles with strong, short-ranged attractions can form a gel. We simulate this process without and with hydrodynamic interactions (HI), using the lattice-Boltzmann method to account for presence of a thermalized solvent. We show…