Related papers: Deconstructing the glass transition through critic…
As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…
The physics of the glass transition and amorphous materials continues to attract the attention of a wide research community after decades of effort. Supercooled liquids and glasses have been studied numerically since the advent of molecular…
Concentrated colloidal suspensions are a well-tested model system which has a glass transition. Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high; the…
We highlight certain key achievements in experimental work on molecular, colloidal and granular glassformers. This short review considers these three classes of experimental systems and focusses largely on the work of the authors and their…
Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high. In these samples, the particles are roughly analogous to individual molecules in a traditional glass. This…
We provide here a brief perspective on the glass transition field. It is an assessment, written from the point of view of theory, of where the field is and where it seems to be heading. We first give an overview of the main phenomenological…
Understanding glass formation is a challenge because the existence of a true glass state, distinct from liquid and solid, remains elusive: Glasses are liquids that have become too viscous to flow. An old idea, as yet unproven…
We study a colloidal suspension confined between two quasi-parallel walls as a model system for glass transitions in confined geometries. The suspension is a mixture of two particle sizes to prevent wall-induced crystallization. We use…
The topic of the glass transition gives rise to a a wide diversity of views. It is, accordingly, characterized by a lack of agreement on which would be the most profitable theoretical perspective. In this chapter, I provide some elements…
We provide a theoretical perspective on the glass transition in molecular liquids at thermal equilibrium, on the spatially heterogeneous and aging dynamics of disordered materials, and on the rheology of soft glassy materials. We start with…
Key to resolving the scientific challenge of the glass transition is to understand the origin of the massive increase in viscosity of liquids cooled below their melting temperature (avoiding crystallisation). A number of competing and often…
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…
Theoretical challenges in understanding the nature of glass and the glass transition remain significant open questions in statistical and condensed matter physics. As a prototypical example of complex physical systems, glasses and the…
Topological defects are typically quantified relative to ordered backgrounds. The importance of these defects to the understanding of physical phenomena including diverse equilibrium melting transitions from low temperature ordered to…
Understanding the physics of glass formation remains one of the major unsolved challenges of condensed matter science. As a material solidifies into a glass, it exhibits a spectacular slowdown of the dynamics upon cooling or compression,…
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…
The glass transition is a long-standing problem in physics. Identifying the structural origin of the transition may lead to the ultimate solution to the problem. Here, for the first time, we discover such a structural origin by proposing a…
We study colloidal particle dynamics of a model glass system using confocal and fluorescence microscopy as the sample evolves from a hard-sphere glass to a liquid with attractive interparticle interactions. The transition from hard-sphere…
The replica theory of glasses predicts that in the infinite dimensional mean field limit there exist two distinct glassy phases of matter: stable glass and marginal glass. We have developed a technique to experimentally probe these phases…
A simple framework is presented for unified applications in various fields of colloidal research, with minimal additional concepts & definitions. Several case studies concerning glass transition & crystallization are provided under the…