Related papers: To make a glass - avoid the crystal
We model charged colloidal suspensions using an analogy with foams. We study the solid--solid phase transitions of these systems as a function of particle volume-fraction and ionic strength. The screened Coulomb interaction is replaced by…
Within the framework of the mode-coupling theory of super-cooled liquids, we investigate new phenomena in colloidal systems on approach to their glass transitions. When the inter-particle potential contains an attractive part, besides the…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
We report a molecular dynamics simulation demonstrating that a columnar liquid crystal, commonly formed by disc-shaped molecules, can be formed by identical particles interacting via a spherically symmetric potential. Upon isochoric cooling…
Colloidal particles or nanoparticles, with equal affinity for two fluids, are known to adsorb irreversibly to the fluid-fluid interface. We present large-scale computer simulations of the demixing of a binary solvent containing such…
When a colloidal suspension is dried, capillary pressure may overwhelm repulsive electrostatic forces, assembling aggregates that are out of thermal equilibrium. This poorly understood process confers cohesive strength to many geological…
Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…
Viscoelastic phase separation of colloidal suspensions can be interrupted to form gels either by glass transition or by crystallization. With a new confocal microscopy protocol, we follow the entire kinetics of phase separation, from…
Crystallization from an amorphous atomic structure is usually seen as a spontaneous process in pursuit of a lower energy state, but for alloy systems it is often hard to elucidate because of the intrinsic structural and compositional…
Glasses and gels are the two dynamically arrested, disordered states of matter. Despite their importance, their similarities and differences remain elusive, especially at high density. We identify dynamical and structural signatures which…
The glass transition is the most enduring grand-challenge problem in contemporary condensed matter physics. Here, we review the contribution of colloid experiments to our understanding of this problem. First, we briefly outline the success…
There exists a variety of theories of the glass transition and many more numerical models. But because the models need built-in complexity to prevent crystallization, comparisons with theory can be difficult. We study the dynamics of a…
Performing light scattering experiments we show that introducing short-ranged attraction to a colloidal suspension of nearly hard spheres by addition of free polymer produces new glass transition phenomena. We observe a dramatic…
We explore the glassy dynamics of soft colloids using microgels and charged particles interacting by steric and screened Coulomb interactions, respectively. In the supercooled regime, the structural relaxation time $\tau_\alpha$ of both…
Molecular dynamics simulations are performed to examine the dynamic response of amorphous solids to oscillatory shear at finite temperatures. The data were collected from a poorly annealed binary glass, which was deformed periodically in…
We use molecular dynamics simulations of a simple model to show that dispersions of slightly elongated colloidal particles with long-range dipolar interactions, like ferrofluids, can form a physical (reversible) gel at low volume fractions.…
We have carried out computer simulations of overcompressed suspensions of hard monodisperse ellipsoids and observed their crystallization dynamics. The system was compressed very rapidly in order to reach the regime of slow, glass-like…
We study Harmonic Soft Spheres as a model of thermal structural glasses in the limit of infinite dimensions. We show that cooling, compressing and shearing a glass lead to a Gardner transition and, hence, to a marginally stable amorphous…
Crystallization is often assumed to be a quasi-static process that is unaffected by details of particle transport other than the bulk diffusion coefficient. Therefore colloidal suspensions are frequently argued to be an ideal toy model for…
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…