Related papers: To make a glass - avoid the crystal
Colloidal gels are widely applied in industry due to their rheological character -- no flow takes place below the yield stress. Such property enables gels to maintain uniform distribution in practical formulations; otherwise, solid…
A growing body of experimental work indicates that physical vapor deposition provides an effective route for preparation of stable glasses, whose properties correspond in some cases to those expected for glasses that have been aged for…
Despite their technological relevance, a full microscopic understanding of glasses is still lacking. This applies even more to their surfaces whose properties largely differ from that of the bulk material. Here, we experimentally…
Colloidal molecules are ideal model systems for mimicking real molecules and can serve as versatile building blocks for the bottom-up self-assembly of flexible and smart materials. While most colloidal molecules are rigid objects, the…
Understanding glass formation is a challenge because the existence of a true glass state, distinct from liquid and solid, remains elusive: Glasses are liquids that have become too viscous to flow. An old idea, as yet unproven…
In many interesting physical settings, such as the vulcanization of rubber, the introduction of permanent random constraints between the constituents of a homogeneous fluid can cause a phase transition to a random solid state. In this…
We discuss the nonlinear rheology of dense colloidal dispersions at the glass transition. A first principles approach starting with interacting Brownian particles in given arbitrary homogeneous (incompressible) flow neglecting hydrodynamic…
Driven granular systems readily form glassy phases at high particle volume fractions and low driving amplitudes. We use computer simulations of a driven granular glass to evidence a re-entrance melting transition into a fluid state, which,…
Due to nonuniform aggregation in liquid state, from the thermodynamic point of view any glass-forming liquid in the vicinity of the liquid-to-solid phase transition temperature, irrespective of its actual chemical composition, shall be…
Quasi-two-dimensional (quasi-2D) colloidal hard-sphere suspensions confined in a slit geometry are widely used as two dimensional (2D) model systems in experiments that probe the glassy relaxation dynamics of 2D systems. However, the…
Unstable systems of fluidized grains in a very-narrow vertical tube can auto-defluidize after some time, the settling particles forming either a glass- or crystal-like structure. We carried out experiments using different polymer spheres,…
We report a detailed experimental study of the structure and dynamics of glassy states in hard spheres with short-range attraction. The system is a suspension of nearly-hard-sphere colloidal particles and non-adsorbing linear polymer which…
We report on the differences between colloidal systems left to evolve in the earth's gravitational field and the same systems for which a slow continuous rotation averaged out the effects of particle sedimentation on a distance scale small…
The influence of cyclic loading and glass stability on structural relaxation and yielding transition in amorphous alloys was investigated using molecular dynamics simulations. We considered a binary mixture cooled deep into the glass phase…
Using Brownian dynamics computer simulations we show that a two-dimensional suspension of self-propelled ("active") colloidal particles crystallizes at sufficiently high densities. Compared to the equilibrium freezing of passive particles…
Unlike crystals, glasses age or devitrify over time, reflecting their non-equilibrium nature. This lack of stability is a serious issue in many industrial applications. Here, we show by numerical simulations that the devitrification of…
We study concentrated colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition. The non-equilibrium nature of the glassy state is most clearly highlighted by aging -- the dependence of the system's properties on the time elapsed…
We study the phase behavior of hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates using extensive computer simulations. We determine the full equilibrium phase diagram for arbitrary densities and plate separations from one to five…
Ultrastable glasses have risen to prominence due to their potentially useful material properties and the tantalizing possibility of a general method of preparation via vapor deposition. Despite the importance of this novel class of…
The yield stress is a defining feature of amorphous materials which is difficult to analyze theoretically, because it stems from the strongly non-linear response of an arrested solid to an applied deformation. Mode-coupling theory predicts…