Related papers: Sudden collapse of a colloidal gel
The compressive yield stress of particle gels shows a highly nonlinear dependence on the packing fraction. We have studied continuous compression processes, and discussed the packing fraction dependence with the particle scale…
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…
A transition from solid-like to liquid-like behavior occurs when colloidal gels are subjected to a prolonged exposure to a steady shear. This phenomenon, which is characterized by a yielding point, is found to be strongly dependent on the…
Confinement can modify the dynamics, the thermodynamics and the structural properties of liquid water, the prototypical anomalous liquid. By considering a general anomalous liquid, suitable for globular proteins, colloids or liquid metals,…
We exploit the controlled drying of millimeter-sized gel beads to investigate isotropic compression of colloidal fractal gels. Using a custom dynamic light scattering setup, we demonstrate that stresses imposed by drying on the bead surface…
The collapse of singular magnetized toroids (Li & Shu 1996) is a natural representation of an early phase in star formation, bridging the prestellar and protostellar phases of the collapse of molecular cloud cores. We revisit the collapse…
Viscoelastic phase separation of colloidal suspensions can be interrupted to form gels either by glass transition or by crystallization. With a new confocal microscopy protocol, we follow the entire kinetics of phase separation, from…
Supercooled liquids and dense colloids exhibit anomalous behaviour known as "spatially heterogeneous dynamics" (SHD), which becomes increasingly pronounced with approach to the glass transition. Recently, SHD has been observed in confined…
What characterises a solid is its way to respond to external stresses. Ordered solids, such crystals, display an elastic regime followed by a plastic one, both well understood microscopically in terms of lattice distortion and dislocations.…
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…
The mechanisms for phase separation in highly concentrated emulsions when subjected to a thermal phase transition remain to be elucidated. Here, we create a hexagonally close-packed monodisperse emulsion in 2D and show that during a…
A spontaneous buckling transition in thin layers of monodomain nematic liquid crystalline gel was observed by polarized light microscopy. The coupling between the orientational ordering of liquid crystalline solvent and the translational…
We study the assembly into a gel network of colloidal particles, via effective interactions that yield local rigidity and make dilute network structures mechanically stable. The self-assembly process can be described by a Flory-Huggins…
The liquid-liquid phase separation of a binary solvent can be arrested by colloidal particles trapped at the interface [K. Stratford et al., Science 309, 5744 (2005)]. We show experimentally that the colloidal network so formed can remain…
We study the formation of a colloidal gel by means of Molecular Dynamics simulations of a model for colloidal suspensions. A slowing down with gel-like features is observed at low temperatures and low volume fractions, due to the formation…
In this Rapid Communication we demonstrate the applicability of an augmented Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo approach for the phase behavior determination of model colloidal systems with short-ranged depletion attraction and long-ranged…
We studied the phase behavior of charged and sterically stabilized colloids using confocal microscopy in a less polar solvent (dielectric constant 5.4). Upon increasing the colloid volume fraction we found a transition from a fluid to a…
We present experiments showing that a granular system of small beads does exhibit ageing properties : its maximum stability angle is measured to increase logarithmically with resting time, i.e. the time elapsed before performing the…
We investigate two-dimensional (2d) melting in the presence of a one-dimensional (1d) periodic potential as, for example, realized in recent experiments on 2d colloids subjected to two interfering laser beams. The topology of the phase…
Superhydrophobicity is connected to the presence of gas pockets within surface asperities. Upon increasing the pressure this "suspended" state may collapse, causing the complete wetting of the rough surface. In order to quantitatively…