Related papers: Dynamic facilitation observed near the colloidal g…

As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…

Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…

Despite decades of research, it remains to be established whether the transformation of a liquid into a glass is fundamentally thermodynamic or dynamic in origin. While observations of growing length scales are consistent with thermodynamic…

The physics of highly excited Rydberg atoms is governed by blockade or exclusion interactions that hinder the excitation of atoms in the proximity of a previously excited one. This leads to cooperative effects and a relaxation dynamics…

Glassy dynamics is intermittent, as particles suddenly jump out of the cage formed by their neighbours, and heterogeneous, as these jumps are not uniformly distributed across the system. Relating these features of the dynamics to the…

Using molecular dynamics simulations, we have determined that the nature of dynamical heterogeneity in jammed liquids is very sensitive to short-ranged attractions. Weakly attractive systems differ little from dense hard-sphere and…

Colloidal mixtures represent a versatile model system to study transport in complex environments. They allow for a systematic variation of the control parameters, namely size ratio, total volume fraction and composition. We study the…

Combining experiments and theory, we address the dynamics of self-propelled particles in crowded environments. We first demonstrate that motile colloids cruising at constant speed through random lattices undergo a smooth transition from…

Dense assemblies of self-propelled particles undergo a nonequilibrium form of glassy dynamics. Physical intuition suggests that increasing departure from equilibrium due to active forces fluidifies a glassy system. We falsify this belief by…

We study a dense colloidal suspension confined between two quasiparallel glass plates as a model system for a supercooled liquid in confined geometries. We directly observe the three-dimensional Brownian motion of the colloidal particles…

We demonstrate that an extended picture of kinetic constraints in glass-forming liquids is sufficient to explain dynamic anomalies observed in dense suspensions of strongly attracting colloidal particles. We augment a simple model of…

We study heterogeneities in a binary Lennard-Jones system below the glass transition using molecular dynamics simulations. We identify mobile and immobile particles and measure their distribution of vibrational amplitudes. For temperatures…

We study the glass transition by exploring a broad class of kinetic rules that can significantly modify the normal dynamics of super-cooled liquids, while maintaining thermal equilibrium. Beyond the usual dynamics of liquids, this class…

Mechanical properties are of central importance to materials sciences, in particular if they depend on external stimuli. Here we investigate the rheological response of amorphous solids, namely col- loidal glasses, to external forces. Using…

We simulate binary soft disk systems in two dimensions, and investigate how the dynamics slow as the area fraction is increased toward the glass transition. The "fragility" quantifies how sensitively the relaxation time scale depends on the…

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…

Many systems, including polymers and molecular liquids, when adequately cooled and/or compressed, solidify into a disordered solid, i.e., a glass. The~transition is not abrupt, featuring progressive decrease of the microscopic mobility and…

The effects of randomly pinning particles in a model glass-forming fluid are studied, with a focus on the dynamically heterogeneous relaxation in the presence of pinning. We show how four-point dynamical correlations can be analysed in real…

We introduce a new and robust approach for characterizing spatially and temporally heterogeneous behavior within a system based on the evolution of dynamic fuctuations once averaged over different space lengths and time scales. We apply it…

A simple model of an active colloid consisting of dumbbell-shaped particles that cyclically change their length without propelling themselves is proposed and analyzed. At nanoscales, it represents an idealization for bacterial cytoplasm or…