Related papers: Microphase separation as the cause of structural c…
The increase of the viscosity, which is observed in attractive colloidal systems by varying the temperature or the volume fraction, can be related to the formation of structures due to particle aggregation. In particular we have studied the…
Glass-forming liquids grow dramatically sluggish upon cooling. This slowdown has long been thought to be accompanied by a growing correlation length. Characteristic dynamical and static length scales, however, have been observed to grow at…
Phase separation is a fundamental phenomenon that produces spatially heterogeneous patterns in soft matter. In this Lecture Note we show that phase separation in these materials generally belongs to what we call "viscoelastic phase…
We present a new type of phase-change behavior relevant for information storage applications, that can be observed in 2D systems with cluster-forming ability. The temperature-based control of the ordering in 2D particle systems depends on…
Impurities in crystalline materials introduce disorder into an otherwise ordered structure due to the formation of lattice defects and grain boundaries. The properties of the resulting polycrystal can differ remarkably from those of the…
Monodisperse ensembles of particles that have cluster crystalline phases at low temperatures can model a number of physical systems, such as vortices in type-1.5 superconductors, colloidal suspensions and cold atoms. In this work we study a…
Hydroxide ion transport and structure in aqueous media is fundamental to many chemical and biological processes. Research on hydroxide behavior has primarily focused on a single fully solvated hydroxide, either as an isolated cluster or in…
We derive a phase diagram for amorphous solids and liquid supercooled water and explain why the amorphous solids of water exist in several different forms. Application of large-deviation theory allows us to prepare such phases in computer…
Molecular chirality leads to a wonderful variety of equilibrium structures, from the simple cholesteric phase to the twist-grain-boundary phases, and it is responsible for interesting and technologically important materials like…
This paper summarizes a talk presented at the April NATO ASI on Spatiotemporal Chaos in Complex Fluids, in Santa Fe, NM. The paper gives reasons that make complex fluids good material systems for conducting experiments on pattern formation…
Mixtures of several macromolecular species can lead to the formation of higher-order structures that often display non-ideal mixing behavior. In this work, we propose a minimal model of a quaternary system which considers the formation of a…
Based on the competition between members of a hierarchy of length scales in complex multi-scale systems, it is shown how clustering of active quantities into concentrated sets, like bubbles in a Swiss cheese, is a generic property that…
The crucial role of hydrodynamic pinch-off instabilities is evidenced in the coarsening stage of viscous liquids. The phase separation of a barium borosilicate glass melt is studied by in-situ synchrotron X-Ray tomography at high…
By means of the isoconfigurational method we calculate the change in the propensity for motion that the structure of a glass-forming system experiences during its relaxation dynamics. The relaxation of such a system has been demonstrated to…
We present a novel Monte Carlo simulation of the phase separation dynamics of a model fluid membrane. Such a phase segregation induces shape changes of the membrane and results in local `budding' under favourable conditions. We present a…
We study an air-fluidized granular monolayer, composed of plastic spheres which roll on a metallic grid. The air current is adjusted so that the spheres never loose contact with the grid, so that the dynamics may be regarded as pseudo…
The presence of microparticles (clusters of micron size) of unknown origin in the volume of water, including highly purified water (bidistilled, deionized), has been repeatedly demonstrated by various methods of physical analysis. Various…
In active systems, whose constituents have non-equilibrium dynamics at local level, fluid-fluid phase separation is widely observed. Examples include the formation of membraneless organelles within cells; the clustering of self-propelled…
We study the phase ordering colloids suspended in a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal below the clearing point Tni and the resulting aggregated structure. Small (150nm) PMMA particles are dispersed in a classical liquid crystal matrix,…
The elastic coupling between plastic events is generally invoked to interpret plastic properties and failure of amorphous soft glassy materials. We report an experiment where the emergence of a self-organized plastic flow is observed well…