Related papers: Surface melting and crystallisation driven by sedi…
Attractive colloids diffuse and aggregate to form gels, solid-like particle networks suspended in a fluid. Gravity is known to strongly impact the stability of gels once they are formed. However, its effect on the process of gel formation…
We study a two-dimensional model for interacting colloidal particles which displays spontaneous clustering. Within this model we investigate the competition between the pinning to a periodic corrugation potential, and a sideways constant…
In this article, we demonstrate a method for inducing reversible crystal-to-crystal transitions in binary mixtures of soft colloidal particles. Through a controlled decrease of salinity and increasingly dominating electrostatic…
We examine sedimentation density profiles of star polymer solutions as an example of colloidal systems in sedimentation equilibrium which exhibit reentrant melting in their bulk phase diagram. Phase transitions between a fluid and a fluid…
Freezing is a fundamental physical phenomenon that has been studied over many decades; yet the role played by surfaces in determining nucleation has remained elusive. Here we report direct computational evidence of surface induced…
We present experiments and simulations on cyclically sheared colloidal gels, and probe their behaviour on several different length scales. The shearing induces structural changes in the experimental gel, changing particles' neighborhoods…
We present a computer simulation study on the crystal nucleation process in suspensions of hard spheres, fully taking into account the solvent hydrodynamics. If the dynamics of collodial crystallization were purely diffusive, the crystal…
A mixture of hard-sphere particles and model emulsion droplets is studied with a Brownian dynamics simulation. We find that the addition of nonwetting emulsion droplets to a suspension of pure hard spheres can lead to both gas-liquid and…
We report on a large scale computer simulation study of crystal nucleation in hard spheres. Through a combined analysis of real and reciprocal space data, a picture of a two-step crystallization process is supported: First dense, amorphous…
Colloidal model systems allow studying crystallization kinetics under fairly ideal conditions with rather well characterized pair interactions and minimized external influences. In complementary approaches therefore experiment, analytic…
We study the evolution from a liquid to a crystal phase in two-dimensional curved space. At early times, while crystal seeds grow preferentially in regions of low curvature, the lattice frustration produced in regions with high curvature is…
We consider the nature of the fluid-solid phase transition in a polydisperse mixture of hard spheres. For a sufficiently polydisperse mixture crystallisation occurs with simultaneous fractionation. At the fluid-solid boundary, a broad fluid…
The "melting" of self-formed rigid structures made of a small number of interacting classical particles confined in an irregular two-dimensional space is investigated using Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that the interplay of…
Heavy particles suspended in a turbulent flow settle faster than in a still fluid. This effect stems from a preferential sampling of the regions where the fluid flows downward and is quantified here as a function of the level of turbulence,…
We consider a model of colloidal spherical particles carrying a permanent dipole moment which is laterally shifted out of the particles' geometrical centres, i.e. the dipole vector is oriented perpendicular to the radius vector of the…
We report computer simulation results on the cluster formation of dipolar colloidal particles driven by a rotating external field in a quasi-two-dimensional setup. We focus on the interplay between permanent dipolar and hydrodynamic…
We present Monte Carlo simulations of colloidal particles pulled into grafted polymer layers by external fields. The insertion free energy of a single colloid into the polymer layer is qualitatively different for surfaces with an ordered…
Soft-granular media, such as dense emulsions, foams or tissues, exhibit either fluid- or solid-like properties depending on the applied external stresses. Whereas bulk rheology of such materials has been thoroughly investigated, the…
The settling of heavy spherical particles in a column of quiescent fluid is investigated. The performed experiments cover a range of Galileo numbers ($110 \leq \text{Ga} \leq 310$) for a fixed density ratio of $\Gamma = \rho_p/\rho_f =…
The contrasting melting behavior of different surface orientations in metals can be explained in terms of a repulsive or attractive effective interaction between the solid-liquid and the liquid-vapor interface. We show how a crucial part of…