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The glass transition is a long-standing unsolved problem in materials science. For polymers, our understanding of glass-formation is particularly poor due to the added complexity of chain connectivity and flexibility; structural relaxation…
We introduce a class of simple models for shear thickening and/ or `jamming' in colloidal suspensions. These are based on schematic mode coupling theory (MCT) of the glass transition, having a memory term that depends on a density variable,…
Charged colloidal particles can self-assemble into gel networks upon screening of electrostatic repulsion by added salt. While gelation of spherical colloids has been extensively studied, much less is known about the gelation dynamics of…
Yielding of amorphous glasses and gels is a mechanically driven transformation of a material from the solid to liquid state on the experimental timescale. It is a ubiquitous fundamental problem of nonequilibrium physics of high importance…
From pasta to biological tissues to contact lenses, gel and gel-like materials inherently soften as they swell with water. In dry, low-relative-humidity environments, these materials stiffen as they de-swell with water. Here, we use…
In this work, we perform experiments with spherical polyacrylamide (PAAm) hydrogel drops/spheres, spanning a broad range of shear moduli and impact velocities on hydrophilic (plasma-treated glass) and hydrophobic (silane-coated) substrates,…
We present an analytic description of the spherically symmetric gravitational collapse of radiatively cooling gas clouds, which illustrates the mechanism by which radiative cooling induces gravitational instability at a characteristic mass…
Conventional drying of colloidal materials and gels (including cement) can lead to detrimental effects due to the buildup of internal stresses as water evaporates from the nano/microscopic pores. However, the underlying nanoscopic…
We present a comprehensive rheological study of a suspension of thermosensitive particles dispersed in water. The volume fraction of these particles can be adjusted by the temperature of the system in a continuous fashion. Due to the finite…
Slurry electrodes are an effective means to improve flow battery performance by reducing electrode fouling and increasing the active surface area necessary for electrochemical reactions. It is critical to understand how the slurry…
Colloidal gels made of carbon black particles dispersed in light mineral oil are "rheo-acoustic" materials, i.e., their mechanical and structural properties can be tuned using high-power ultrasound, sound waves with submicron amplitude and…
We study the nature of the glass transition by cooling model atomistic glass formers at constant rate from a temperature above the onset of glassy dynamics to $T=0$. Motivated by the East model, a kinetically constrained lattice model with…
Hydrogels are biphasic, swollen polymer networks where elastic deformation is coupled to nanoscale fluid flow. As a consequence, hydrogels can withstand large strains and exhibit nonlinear, hyperelastic properties. For low-modulus hydrogel…
In the last decade five new ice phases were experimentally prepared. Two of them are empty clathrate hydrates and three of them represent hydrogen ordered counterparts of previously known disordered ice phases. Here, we report on hydrogen…
We study the stress response to a step strain of covalently bonded gelatin gels in the temperature range where triple helix reversible crosslink formation is prohibited. We observe slow stress relaxation towards a $T$-dependent finite…
The morphology and the microscopic internal dynamics of a bidimensional gel formed by spontaneous aggregation of gold nanoparticles confined at the water surface are investigated by a suite of techniques, including grazing-incidence x-ray…
The nonlinear rheology of a soft glassy material is captured by its constitutive relation, shear stress vs shear rate, which is most generally obtained by sweeping up or down the shear rate over a finite temporal window. For a huge amount…
We investigate the steady uniform shear flow of a granular gas composed of inelastic and rough Maxwell particles. Exploiting the mean-field character of the model, we derive exact expressions for the collisional production rates of the…
It is common practice to discuss the temperature effect on molecular dynamics of glass formers above the melting temperature in terms of the Arrhenius law. Using dielectric spectroscopy measurements of dc-conductivity and structural…
We demonstrate levitation and three-dimensionally stable trapping of a wide variety of particles in a vacuum chamber through the use of the thermophoretic force in the presence of a strong temperature gradient. Typical sizes of the trapped…