Related papers: Syneresis and delayed detachment in agar plates
Using a unique home-made cell for four-contact impedance spectroscopy of conductive liquid samples, we establish the existence of two low frequency conductivity relaxations in aqueous solutions of gelatin, in both liquid and gel state. A…
Biofilms are antibiotic-resistant bacterial aggregates that grow on moist surfaces and can trigger hospital-acquired infections. They provide a classical example in biology where the dynamics of cellular communities may be observed and…
When a hydrophilic and deformable porous material is immersed in a bath, it may absorb the solvent and expand by several times its volume, thus forming a highly soft and porous hydrogel. A stress applied on the soft hydrogel surface deforms…
We exploit the controlled drying of millimeter-sized gel beads to investigate isotropic compression of colloidal fractal gels. Using a custom dynamic light scattering setup, we demonstrate that stresses imposed by drying on the bead surface…
Low-density "equilibrium" gels that consist of a percolated, kinetically arrested network of colloidal particles and are resilient to aging can be fabricated by restricting the number of effective bonds that form between the colloids.…
Granular materials segregate spontaneously due to differences in particle size, shape, density and flow behaviour. In this paper we experimentally investigate density-difference-driven segregation for a range of density ratios and a range…
Many systems in nature, glasses, interfaces and fractures being some examples, cannot equilibrate with their environment, which gives rise to novel and surprising behaviour such as memory effects, ageing and nonlinear dynamics. Unlike their…
We consider a simple model of a structural glass, represented by a lattice gas with kinetic constraints in contact with a particle reservoir. Quench below the glass transition is represented by the jump of the chemical potential above a…
In this work, we investigate the transient rheological behavior of two soft glassy materials: a clay dispersion and a silica gel, emphasizing their unconventional shear stress build-up behavior under conditions of constant imposed strain.…
In the classic theory of solid adhesion, surface energy drives deformation to increase contact area while bulk elasticity opposes it. Recently, solid surface stress has been shown also to play an important role in opposing deformation of…
The sticking of a soft polystyrene colloidal particle to a planar glass plate was studied by a microrheological technique using an optical tweezer to trap the particle and a piezoelectric-stage to position the plate and to sinusoidally…
Stellar shells are low surface brightness features, created during nearly head-on galaxy mergers from the debris of the tidally disrupted satellite. Here, we investigate the formation and evolution mechanism of shells in six dimensions (3d…
When two types of side chains (A,B) are densely grafted to a (stiff) backbone and the resulting bottle-brush polymer is in a solution under poor solvent conditions, an incompatibility between A and B leads to microphase separation in the…
We present a numerical study of the structural correlations associated to gas adsorption/desorption in silica aerogels in order to provide a theoretical interpretation of scattering experiments. Following our earlier work, we use a…
Polymer gels are comprised of a three-dimensional, cross-linked network that can typically withstand the mechanical deformation associated with both swelling and de-swelling. Thus, gels can be designed with smart behaviors that require both…
We review a few representative examples of granular experiments or models where phase separation, accompanied by domain coarsening, is a relevant phenomenon. We first elucidate the intrinsic non-equilibrium, or athermal, nature of granular…
We study creep flow and yielding of particulate depletion gels under constant shear stress, combining data on different length and time scales. We characterise the breakage of meso-scale strands in the gel. Breakage events are distributed…
Colloidal gels have strong industrial relevance as they can behave liquid- and solid-like. The latter allows them to support the buoyant weight against gravity. However, the system is intrinsically out-of-equilibrium, which means that the…
We investigate the collective behavior of suspended thermoresponsive microgels, that expel solvent and subsequently decrease in size upon heating. Using a binary mixture of differently thermoresponsive microgels, we demonstrate how…
The evolution of the polymer structure during nanocomposite formation and annealing of silica-latex nanocomposites is studied using contrast-variation small angle neutron scattering. The experimental system is made of silica nanoparticles…