Related papers: To make a glass - avoid the crystal

This key-issues review is a plea for a new focus on simpler and more realistic models of glass-forming fluids. It seems to me that we have too often been led astray by sophisticated mathematical models that beautifully capture some of the…

During drying of colloidal suspensions, colloidal particles can form concentrated particle layers beneath the receding free surface. The drying rate can gradually decrease with the growth of the particle layers. We construct a model to…

Amorphous solids, such as glasses, have complex responses to deformations, with significant consequences in material design and applications. In this respect two intertwined aspects are important: stability and reversibility. It is crucial…

Bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) are amorphous alloys with desirable mechanical properties and processing capabilities. To date, the design of new BMGs has largely employed empirical rules and trial-and-error experimental approaches. Ab initio…

The transition from a liquid to a glass in colloidal suspensions of particles interacting through a hard core plus an attractive square-well potential is studied within the mode-coupling-theory framework. When the width of the attractive…

The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal,…

We observed a two-step glass transition in monolayers of colloidal ellipsoids by video microscopy. The glass transition in the rotational degree of freedom was at a lower density than that in the translational degree of freedom. Between the…

Using controlled spinodal decomposition, we have created a fluid-bicontinuous structure stabilized by colloidal particles. We present confocal microscopy studies of these structures and their variation with kinetic pathway. Our studies…

Recently, ultrastable glasses have been created through vapor deposition. Subsequently, computer simulation algorithms have been proposed that mimic the vapor deposition process and result in simulated glasses with increased stability. In…

Understanding relaxation of supercooled fluids is a major challenge and confining such systems can lead to bewildering behaviour. Here we exploit an optically confined colloidal model system in which we use reduced pressure as a control…

Amorphous solids exhibit quasi-universal low-temperature anomalies whose origin has been ascribed to localized tunneling defects. Using an advanced Monte Carlo procedure, we create {\it in silico} glasses spanning from hyperquenched to…

Structure-dynamics correlation is one of the major ongoing debates in the glass transition, although a number of structural features have been found connected to the dynamic heterogeneity in different glass-forming colloidal systems. Here…

We introduce a simple spherical model whose structural properties are similar to the ones generated by models with directional interactions, by employing a binary mixture of large and small hard spheres, with a square-well attraction acting…

Amorphous solids exhibit intrinsic, local structural transitions, that give rise to the well known quantum-mechanical two-level systems at low temperatures. We explain the microscopic origin of the electric dipole moment of these two-level…

We employ parallel superposition rheology to study the dynamics of an aging colloidal glass in the presence of a mean field stress. Over a range of intermediate stresses, the loss modulus exceeds the storage modulus at short times but…

We study concentrated colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition. Samples in the glassy state show aging, in that the motion of the colloidal particles slows as the sample ages from an initial state. We study the…

Colloidal particles are not simple rigid particles, in general an isolated particle is a system with many degrees of freedom in its own right, e.g., the counterions around a charged colloidal particle.The behaviour of model colloidal…

The ionic composition and pair correlations in fluid phases of realistically salt-free charged colloidal sphere suspensions are calculated in the primitive model. We obtain the number densities of all ionic species in suspension, including…

We study -- using molecular dynamics simulations -- the temperature dependence of the dynamics in a dense short-ranged attractive colloidal glass to find evidence of the kinetic glass-glass transition predicted by the ideal Mode Coupling…

Concentrated suspensions of small ultra-soft colloids (ultra-low crosslinked microgels) are investigated with scattering and steady shear rheology to capture their equilibrium dynamics. The suspensions lack dynamic arrest, although the slow…