Related papers: To make a glass - avoid the crystal
Glasses remain an elusive and poorly understood state of matter. For example, it is not clear how we can design an efficient macroscopic glass former by tuning the properties of its microscopic building blocks. In this paper, we propose a…
Spherical colloids arranged in a crystalline order are known to produce structural colors. The intensity and brilliance of such photonic crystals require high size-monodispersity of the colloids, a low number of lattice defects and…
Colloidal particles with appropriate wetting properties can become very strongly trapped at an interface between two immiscible fluids. We have harnessed this phenomenon to create a new class of soft materials with intriguing and…
The unconventional thermal properties of jammed amorphous solids are directly related to their density of vibrational states. While the vibrational spectrum of jammed soft sphere solids has been fully described, the vibrational spectrum of…
We study confined colloidal suspensions as a model system which approximates the behavior of confined small molecule glass-formers. Dense colloidal suspensions become glassier when confined between parallel glass plates. We use confocal…
When subjected to large amplitude oscillatory shear stress, aqueous Laponite suspensions show an abrupt solidification transition after a long delay time tc. We measure the dependence of tc on stress amplitude, frequency, and on the…
We review the recent literature on the simulation of the structure and deformation of amorphous glasses, including oxide and metallic glasses. We consider simulations at different length and time scales. At the nanometer scale, we review…
Dynamical heterogeneities in a colloidal fluid close to gelation are studied by means of computer simulations. A clear distinction between some fast particles and the rest, slow ones, is observed, yielding a picture of the gel composed by…
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…
We propose a geometrical characterization of amorphous liquid structures that suppress crystallization by competing locally with crystalline order. We introduce for this purpose the crystal affinity of a liquid, a simple measure of its…
A recently proposed schematic model for the non--linear rheology of dense colloidal dispersions is compared to flow curves measured in suspensions that consist of thermosensitive particles. The volume fraction of this purely repulsive model…
Freezing of charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions and relative stabilities of crystals and quasicrystals are studied using thermodynamic perturbation theory. Macroion interactions are modelled by effective pair potentials combining…
The design of complex materials and the formation of specific patterns often arise from the properties of the individual building blocks. In this respect, colloidal systems offer a unique opportunity because nowadays they can be synthesized…
A solid - amorphous or crystalline - is defined by a finite shear modulus while a fluid lacks such. We thus experimentally investigate the elastic properties of a colloidal glass former near the glass transition: spectroscopy of vibrational…
We report an extensive numerical study of a charged colloidal system with competing short-range depletion attraction and long-range electrostatic repulsion. By analizing the cluster properties, we identify two distinct regions in the phase…
The solidity of glassy materials is believed to be due to the cage formed around each particle by its neighbors, but in reality the details of cage-formation remain elusive [1-4]. This cage starts to be formed at the onset…
We show using numerical simulations that a rich variety of novel colloidal crystalline states are realized on square and triangular two dimensional periodic substrates which can be experimentally created using crossed laser arrays. When…
Ultrasoft colloids typically do not spontaneously crystallize, but rather vitrify, at high concentrations. Combining in-situ rheo-SANS experiments and numerical simulations we show that shear facilitates crystallization of colloidal star…
We study numerically a monodisperse model of interacting classical particles predicted to exhibit a static liquid-glass transition. Using a dynamical Monte Carlo method we show that the model does not freeze into a glassy phase at low…
Lithium disilicate glasses and glass-ceramics are good potential candidates for biomedical applications and solid-state batteries, and serve as models of nucleation and crystal growth. Moreover, these glasses exhibit a phase separation that…