Related papers: Formation of a transient amorphous solid in low de…
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…
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…
Glass forming liquids exhibit a rich phenomenology upon confinement. This is often related to the effects arising from wall-fluid interactions. Here we focus on the interesting limit where the separation of the confining walls becomes of…
The rheological response, in particular the non-linear response, to oscillatory shear is experimentally investigated in colloidal glasses. The glasses are highly concentrated binary hard-sphere mixtures with relatively large size…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
Charge-stabilized colloidal spheres dispersed in deionized water are supposed to repel each other. Instead, artifact-corrected video microscopy measurements reveal an anomalous long-ranged like-charge attraction in the interparticle pair…
We study concentrated colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition. The non-equilibrium nature of the glassy state is most clearly highlighted by aging -- the dependence of the system's properties on the time elapsed…
We develop a thermodynamic description of particles held at a fixed surface potential. This system is of particular interest in view of the continuing controversy over the possibility of a fluid-fluid phase separation in aqueous colloidal…
We explore the glassy dynamics of soft colloids using microgels and charged particles interacting by steric and screened Coulomb interactions, respectively. In the supercooled regime, the structural relaxation time $\tau_\alpha$ of both…
Recent experiments performed on a variety of soft glassy materials have demonstrated that any imposed shear flow serves to simultaneously fluidize these systems in all spatial directions [Ovarlez \textit{et al.} (2010)]. When probed with a…
The phase behavior of helical packings of thermoresponsive microspheres inside glass capillaries is studied as a function of volume fraction. Stable packings with long-range orientational order appear to evolve abruptly to disordered states…
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…
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 dynamical arrest of gels is the consequence of a well defined structural phase transition, leading to the formation of a spanning cluster of bonded particles. The dynamical glass transition, instead, is not accompanied by any clear…
We study concentrated binary colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition as the volume fraction $\phi$ of particles is increased. We use confocal microscopy to directly observe particle motion within dense samples…
We describe the phase diagram of amorphous solid water by performing molecular dynamics simulations. Our simulations follow different paths in the phase diagram: isothermal compression/decompression, isochoric cooling/heating and isobaric…
Glass films prepared by a process of physical vapor deposition have been shown to have thermodynamic and kinetic stability comparable to those of ordinary glasses aged for thousands of years. A central question in the study of…
Enormous enhancement in the viscosity of a liquid near its glass transition is generally connected to the growing many-body static correlations near the transition, often coined as `amorphous ordering'. Estimating the length scales of such…
The evolution of porous structure and mechanical properties of binary glasses under tensile loading were examined using molecular dynamics simulations. We consider vitreous systems obtained in the process of phase separation after a rapid…