Related papers: On polydispersity and the hard-sphere glass transi…
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…
Glassy soft matter is often continuously polydisperse, in which the sizes or various properties of the constituent particles are distributed continuously. However, most of the microscopic theories of the glass transition focus on the…
We study by molecular dynamics the interplay between arrest and crystallization in hard spheres. For state points in the plane of volume fraction ($0.54 \leq phi \leq 0.63$) and polydispersity ($0 \leq s \leq 0.085$), we delineate states…
State-of-the-art techniques for simulating deeply supercooled liquids require a high degree of size polydispersity to be effective. While these techniques have enabled great insight into the microscopic dynamics near the glass transition,…
The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…
The phase diagram of soft spheres with size dispersion has been studied by means of an optimized Monte Carlo algorithm which allows to equilibrate below the kinetic glass transition for all sizes distribution. The system ubiquitously…
We perform extensive numerical simulations of a paradigmatic model glass former, the hard-sphere fluid with 10% polydispersity. We sample from the ensemble of trajectories with fixed observation time, whereby single trajectories are…
We propose a connection between self-similar, focusing dynamics in nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) and macroscopic dynamic features of the glass transition. In particular, we explore the divergence of the appropriate…
Although the concept of random close packing with an almost universal packing fraction of ~ 0.64 for hard spheres was introduced more than half a century ago, there are still ongoing debates. The main difficulty in searching the densest…
Thermoresponsive poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) particles of a nearly constant swelling ratio and with polydispersity indices (PDIs) varying over a wide range (7.4% - 48.9%) are synthesized to study the effects of polydispersity on…
Motivated by the mean field prediction of a Gardner phase transition between a "normal glass" and a "marginally stable glass", we investigate the off-equilibrium dynamics of three-dimensional polydisperse hard spheres, used as a model for…
Soft glassy materials often consist of deformable objects. Here, we use a two-dimensional assembly of semi-flexible ring polymers as a model system to investigate how polydispersity in particle stiffness or size influences the onset of…
We study theoretically and numerically the microscopic cause of the mechanical stability of hard sphere glasses near their maximum packing. We show that, after coarse-graining over time, the hard sphere interaction can be described by an…
We study concentrated binary colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition as the volume fraction $\phi$ of particles is increased. We use confocal microscopy to directly observe particle motion within dense samples…
Motivated by a recently identified severe discrepancy between a static and a dynamic theory of glasses, we numerically investigate the behavior of dense hard spheres in spatial dimensions 3 to 12. Our results are consistent with the static…
The most efficient way to pack equally sized spheres isotropically in 3D is known as the random close packed state, which provides a starting point for many approximations in physics and engineering. However, the particle size distribution…
We study a mass transport model, where spherical particles diffusing on a ring can stochastically exchange volume $v$, with the constraint of a fixed total volume $V=\sum_{i=1}^N v_i$, $N$ being the total number of particles. The particles,…
We investigate structural and dynamical properties of moderately polydisperse emulsions across an extended range of droplet volume fractions phgr, encompassing fluid and glassy states up to jamming. Combining experiments and simulations, we…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…
We use dynamic light scattering and computer simulations to study equilibrium dynamics and dynamic heterogeneity in concentrated suspensions of colloidal hard spheres. Our study covers an unprecedented density range and spans seven decades…