Related papers: The interplay of sedimentation and crystallization…

The discrepancy in nucleation rate densities between simulated and experimental hard spheres remains staggering and unexplained. Suggestively, more strongly sedimenting colloidal suspensions of hard spheres nucleate much faster than weakly…

We consider the sedimentation of a colloidal gel under confinement in the direction of gravity. The confinement allows us to compare directly experiments and computer simulations, for the same system size in the vertical direction. The…

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 present a computer simulation study on the crystal nucleation process in suspensions of hard spheres, fully taking into account the solvent hydrodynamics. If the dynamics of collodial crystallization were purely diffusive, the crystal…

Motivated by old experiments on colloidal suspensions, we report molecular dynamics simulations of assemblies of hard spheres, addressing crystallization and glass formation. The simulations cover wide ranges of polydispersity s (standard…

We use Brownian Dynamics simulations in combination with the umbrella sampling technique to study the effect of shear flow on homogeneous crystal nucleation. We find that a homogeneous shear rate leads to a significant suppression of the…

Hard-sphere model systems are well-suited in both experiment and simulations to investigate fundamental aspects of the crystallization of fluids. In experiments on colloidal models of hard-sphere fluids, the uid is unavoidably at contact…

We investigate the effects of the reversal of the gravitational field onto a sedimented and partially crystallised suspension of nearly-hard sphere colloids. We analyse the structural changes that take place during the melting of the…

We study the conditions under which and how an imposed cluster of fixed colloidal particles at prescribed positions triggers crystal nucleation from a metastable colloidal fluid. Dynamical density functional theory of freezing and Brownian…

We consider homogeneous crystallisation rates in confocal microscopy experiments on colloidal nearly hard spheres at the single particle level. These we compare with Brownian dynamics simuations by carefully modelling the softness in the…

We use a mesoscopic simulation technique to study the effect of short-ranged inter-particle attraction on the steady-state sedimentation of colloidal suspensions. Attractions increase the average sedimentation velocity $v_s$ compared to the…

We study the spontaneous nucleation and crystallization of linear and cyclic chains of flexibly connected hard spheres using extensive molecular dynamics simulations. To this end, we present a novel event-driven molecular dynamics…

We study experimentally and theoretically the sedimentation of gels made of strongly aggregated colloidal particles, focussing on the long time behavior, when mechanical equilibrium is asymptotically reached. The asymptotic gel height is…

For sedimenting colloidal hard spheres, the propagation and broadening of the crystal-fluid interface is studied by Brownian dynamics computer simulations of an initially homogeneous sample. Two different types of interface broadenings are…

Over the past two decades, a large number of studies addressed the topic of crystal nucleation in suspensions of hard spheres. The shared result of all these efforts is that, at low super-saturations, experimentally observed nucleation…

We study theoretically the effect of a gravitational field on the equilibrium behaviour of a colloidal suspension of rods with different length-to-width aspect ratios. The bulk phases of the system are described with analytical equations of…

We report on the differences between colloidal systems left to evolve in the earth's gravitational field and the same systems for which a slow continuous rotation averaged out the effects of particle sedimentation on a distance scale small…

We investigate sedimentation of model hard sphere-like colloidal dispersions confined in horizontal capillaries using laser scanning confocal microscopy, dynamical density functional theory, and Brownian dynamics computer simulations. For…

Colloidal particles that are confined to an interface effectively form a two-dimensional fluid. We examine the dynamics of such colloids when they are subject to a constant external force, which drives them in a particular direction over…

The crystallization of a metastable melt is one of the most important non equilibrium phenomena in condensed matter physics, and hard sphere colloidal model systems have been used for several decades to investigate this process by…