Related papers: On the Formation of Equilibrium Gels via a Macrosc…
Low-density "equilibrium" gels that consist of a percolated, kinetically arrested network of colloidal particles and are resilient to aging can be fabricated by restricting the number of effective bonds that form between the colloids.…
Determining the onset of rigidity in gels is a fundamental challenge with significant practical implications across different applications. Limited-valence, or patchy-particle systems have proven to be a valuable model to study the…
Gels are low-packing arrested states of matter which are able to support stress. On cooling, limited valence colloidal particles form open networks stabilized by the progressive increase of the interparticle bond lifetime. These gels, named…
We consider a microscopic model of a polymer blend that is prone to phase separation. Permanent crosslinks are introduced between randomly chosen pairs of monomers, drawn from the Deam-Edwards distribution. Thereby, not only density but…
We study a model in which particles interact with short-ranged attractive and long-ranged repulsive interactions, in an attempt to model the equilibrium cluster phase recently discovered in sterically stabilized colloidal systems in the…
We propose and analyze a mathematical model of the mechanics of gels, consisting of the laws of balance of mass and linear momentum. We consider a gel to be an immiscible and incompressible mixture of a nonlinearly elastic polymer and a…
Colloids that attractively bond to only a few neighbors (e.g., patchy particles) can form equilibrium gels with distinctive dynamic properties that are stable in time. Here, we use a coarse-grained model to explore the dynamics of linked…
By means of Langevin dynamics simulations, we investigate the gel formation of randomly functionalized polymers in solution, with the ability to form both intra- and intermolecular reversible bonds. Under highly dilute conditions, these…
Low-density networks of molecules or colloids are formed at low temperatures when the interparticle interactions are valence limited. Prototypical examples are networks of patchy particles, where the limited valence results from highly…
The dynamical arrest of attractive colloidal particles into out-of-equilibrium structures, known as gelation, is central to biophysics, materials science, nanotechnology, and food and cosmetic applications, but a complete understanding is…
Melting is often understood in purely equilibrium terms, where crystalline order disappears once the free energy of the solid equals that of the liquid. Yet at the microscopic level, the initiating events for melting can often be traced to…
We present experimental evidence for a first-order freezing/melting phase transition in a nonequilibrium system -- an oscillated two-dimensional isobaric granular fluid. The steady-state transition occurs between a gas and a crystal and is…
Colloidal nanocrystal gels can be assembled using a difunctional "linker" molecule to mediate bonding between nanocrystals. The conditions for gelation and the structure of the gel are controlled macroscopically by the linker concentration…
We numerically study a simple model for thermo-reversible colloidal gelation in which particles can form reversible bonds with a predefined maximum number of neighbors. We focus on three and four maximally coordinated particles, since in…
We investigate systems of self-propelled particles with alignment interaction. Compared to previous work, the force acting on the particles is not normalized and this modification gives rise to phase transitions from disordered states at…
In this work, we establish a general theory of phase transitions and quantum entanglement in the equilibrium state at arbitrary temperatures. First, we derived a set of universal functional relations between the matrix elements of two-body…
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…
Equilibrium gels of colloidal particles can be realized through the introduction of a second species, a linker that mediates the bonds between the colloids. A gel forming binary mixture whose linkers can self-assemble into linear chains…
Ultracold gases of dipolar molecules have long been envisioned as a platform for the realization of novel quantum phases. Recent advances in collisional shielding, protecting molecules from inelastic losses, have enabled the creation of…
We discuss a class of models for particulate gels in which the particle contacts are described by an effective interaction combining a two-body attraction and a three-body angular repulsion. Using molecular dynamics, we show how varying the…