Related papers: Crystal-to-crystal transition of ultrasoft colloid…

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…

A Landau theory is presented for the structural transition of electrically stabilized colloidal crystals under shear. The model suggests that a structural transition from an ordered layered colloidal crystal into a disordered structure…

A bulk metallic glass forming alloy is subjected to shear flow in its supercooled state by compression of a short rod to produce a flat disc. The resulting material exhibits enhanced crystallization kinetics during isothermal annealing as…

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…

We report simulations on the homogeneous liquid-fcc nucleation of charged colloids for both low and high contact energy values. As a precursor for crystal formation, we observe increased local order at the position where the crystal will…

When exposed to strong shearing, the particles in a crystal will rearrange and ultimately, the crystal will break by forming large nonaffine defects. Even for the initial stage of this process, only little effort has been devoted to the…

When strained beyond the linear regime, soft colloidal glasses yield to steady-state plastic flow in a way that is similar to the deformation of conventional amorphous solids. Due to the much larger size of the colloidal particles with…

We study numerically the crystallization process in a supersaturated suspension of repulsive colloidal particles driven by simple shear flow. The effect of the shear flow on crystallization is two-fold: while it suppresses the initial…

Colloidal crystals formed by size-asymmetric binary particles co-assemble into a wide variety of colloidal compounds with lattices akin to ionic crystals. Recently, a transition from a compound phase with a sublattice of small particles to…

Crystallization from an amorphous atomic structure is usually seen as a spontaneous process in pursuit of a lower energy state, but for alloy systems it is often hard to elucidate because of the intrinsic structural and compositional…

Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…

Yielding is central to the relaxation, flow and fracture of a wide range of soft and molecular glasses, but its microscopic origin remains unclear. Here, we elucidate the yielding of a colloidal glass by using x-ray scattering to monitor…

We use theory and simulations to investigate the existence of amorphous glassy states in ultrasoft colloids. We combine the hyper-netted chain approximation with mode-coupling theory to study the dynamic phase diagram of soft repulsive…

The kinetics of phase transition processes often governs the resulting material microstruc-ture. Using optical microscopy, we here investigate the formation and stabilization of a po-rous crystalline microstructure forming in low-salt…

We present results from density functional theory and computer simulations that unambiguously predict the occurrence of first-order freezing transitions for a large class of ultrasoft model systems into cluster crystals. The clusters…

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…

Crystallization and vitrification are two different routes to form a solid. Normally these two processes suppress each other, with the glass transition preventing crystallization at high density (or low temperature). This is even true for…

In many technical applications, but also in natural processes like ice nucleation in clouds, crystallization proceeds in the presence of stresses and flows, hence the importance to understand the crystallization mechanism in simple…

Hard sphere colloidal particles are a basic model system for general research into phase behavior, ordering and out-equilibrium glass transitions. Experimentally it has been shown that oscillatory shearing of a monodisperse hard sphere…

Chiral crystals, like chiral molecules, cannot be superimposed onto their mirror images -- a fundamental property that has been linked to interesting physical behavior and exploited in functional devices. Among the simplest inorganic…