Related papers: Cluster structure and dynamics in gels and glasses
The presence of dynamical heterogeneities, i.e. nanometer-scale regions containing molecules rearranging cooperatively at very different rates compared to the bulk, is increasingly being recognized as crucial in our understanding of the…
We identify the pattern of microscopic dynamical relaxation for a two dimensional glass forming liquid. On short timescales, bursts of irreversible particle motion, called cage jumps, aggregate into clusters. On larger time scales, clusters…
The binary hard-sphere mixture is one of the simplest representations of a many-body system with competing time and length scales. This model is relevant to fundamentally understand both the structural and dynamical properties of materials,…
The existence of heterogeneity in the dynamics of supercooled liquids is believed to be one of the hallmarks of the glass transition. Intense research has been carried out in the past to understand the origin of this heterogeneity in…
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,…
We use event driven simulations to analyze glassy dynamics as a function of density and energy dissipation in a two-dimensional bidisperse granular fluid under stationary conditions. Clear signatures of a glass transition are identified,…
We numerically elucidate the microscopic mechanisms controlling the relaxation dynamics of a three-dimensional lattice glass model that has static properties compatible with the approach to a random first-order transition. At low…
We present molecular dynamics (MD) simulations results for dense fluids of ultrasoft, fully-penetrable particles. These are a binary mixture and a polydisperse system of particles interacting via the generalized exponential model, which is…
We consider gelation of colloidal particles in suspension after cessation of shear flow. Particle aggregation is driven by a temperature-tunable attractive potential which controls the growth of clusters under isothermal conditions. A…
We numerically investigate slow dynamics of a binary mixture of ultrasoft particles interacting with the generalized Hertzian potential. If the softness parameter, $\alpha$, is small, the particles at high densities start penetrating each…
We study dynamic heterogeneities in a model glass-former whose overlap with a reference configuration is constrained to a fixed value. The system phase-separates into regions of small and large overlap, so that dynamical correlations remain…
We use computer simulations to study the dynamics of a physical gel at high densities where gelation and the glass transition interfere. We report and provide detailed physical understanding of complex relaxation patterns for time…
We investigate structural and dynamical properties of moderately polydisperse emulsions across an extended range of droplet volume fractions phgr, encompassing fluid and glassy states up to jamming. Combining experiments and simulations, we…
We consider the stationary state of a fluid comprised of inelastic hard spheres or disks under the influence of a random, momentum-conserving external force. Starting from the microscopic description of the dynamics, we derive a nonlinear…
Despite the diversity of materials designated as active matter, virtually all active systems undergo a form of dynamic arrest when crowding and activity compete, reminiscent of the dynamic arrest observed in colloidal and molecular fluids…
We report an experimental investigation of the caging motion in a uniformly heated granular fluid, for a wide range of filling fractions, $\phi$. At low $\phi$ the classic diffusive behavior of a fluid is observed. However, as $\phi$ is…
Gels in soft-matter systems are an important nonergodic state of matter. We study a colloid-polymer mixture which is quenched by increasing the polymer concentration, from a fluid to a gel. Using confocal microscopy, we study both the…
In polymers melts and supercooled liquids, the glassy dynamics is characterized by the rattling of monomers or particles in the cage formed by their neighbors. Recently, a direct correlation in such systems, described by a universal scaling…
Two-dimensional (2D) particulate aggregates formed due to competing interactions exhibit a range of non-equilibrium steady state morphologies from finite-size compact crystalline structures to non-compact string-like conformations. We…
The competition of depletion attractions and longer-ranged repulsions between colloidal particles in colloid-polymer mixtures leads to the formation of heterogeneous gel-like structures. For instance, gel networks, i.e., states where the…