Related papers: Polyhedral colloidal `rocks': low-dimensional netw…
Liquids and solids are two fundamental states of matter. However, due to the lack of direct experimental determination, our understanding of the 3D atomic structure of liquids and amorphous solids remained speculative. Here we advance…
Colloidal dispersions are prized as model systems to understand basic properties of materials, and are central to a wide range of industries from cosmetics to foods to agrichemicals. Among the key developments in using colloids to address…
Colloidal gels are prime examples of functional materials exhibiting disordered, amorphous, yet meta-stable forms. They maintain stability through short-range attractive forces and their material properties are tunable by external forces.…
The behavior of microgels near surfaces and their adsorption is studied by simple scaling theory. Two different types of microgels can be studied, i.e., fractal type microgels and randomly crosslinked polymer chains. In the first case the…
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…
The rapid collapse of a polymer, due to external forces or changes in solvent, yields a long-lived `crumpled globule.' The conjectured fractal structure shaped by hierarchical collapse dynamics has proved difficult to establish, even with…
Soft matter systems are common in nature and make up nearly all the essential components necessary for life, from cells to the organelles within those cells. The ability of these soft materials to deform is crucial for the proper…
We present a study on buckling of colloidal particles, including experimental, theoretical and numerical developments. Oil-filled thin shells prepared by emulsion templating show buckling in mixtures of water and ethanol, due to dissolution…
We use an extended version of the standard tunneling model to explain the anisotropic sound absorption in decagonal quasicrystals. The glassy properties are determined by an ensemble of two level systems (TLS), arbitrarily oriented. The TLS…
We study, via the replica method of disordered systems, the packing problem of hard-spheres with a square-well attractive potential when the space dimensionality, d, becomes infinitely large. The phase diagram of the system exhibits…
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…
In this article we review some problems in physics, chemistry and mathematics that lead naturally to a class of polyhedra which include the Platonic solids. Examples include the study of electrons on a sphere, cages of carbon atoms, central…
Colloidal assembly represents a powerful method for the fabrication of functional materials. In this article, we describe how acoustic radiation forces can guide the assembly of colloidal particles into structures that serve as microscopic…
Colloidal particles trapped at an interface between two fluids can form a wide range of different structures. Replacing one of the fluid with a liquid crystal increases the complexity of interactions and results in a greater range of…
We perform molecular-dynamics simulations of the vibrational and the elasto-plastic properties of polymeric glasses and crystals and corresponding atomic systems. We evidence that the elastic scaling of the density of states in the…
Rigid particles pack into structures, such as sand dunes on the beach, whose overall stability is determined by the average number of contacts between particles. However, when packing spatially extended objects with flexible shapes,…
Using the orthogonal connectedness, we introduce the notion of orthogonal decomposability of convex polytopes and study it in the case of Platonic and Archimedean solids. While doing so, we also encounter polytopes which are not…
The effects of particle roughness and short-ranged non-central forces on colloidal gels are studied using computer simulations in which particles experience a sinusoidal variation in energy as they rotate. The number of minima $n$ and…
Connecting the collective behavior of disordered systems with local structure on the particle scale is an important challenge, for example in granular and glassy systems. Compounding complexity, in many scientific and industrial…
Performing light scattering experiments we show that introducing short-ranged attraction to a colloidal suspension of nearly hard spheres by addition of free polymer produces new glass transition phenomena. We observe a dramatic…