Related papers: Particles redistribution and structural defects de…
The freezing of water is one of the major causes of mechanical damage in materials during wintertime; surprisingly this happens even in situations where water only partially saturates the material so that the ice has room to grow. Here we…
The properties of crystals consisting of several components can be widely tuned. Often solid solutions are produced, where substitutional or interstitional disorder determines the crystal thermodynamic and mechanical properties. The…
The spontaneous formation of droplets via dewetting of a thin fluid film from a solid substrate allows for materials nanostructuring, under appropriate experimental control. While thermal fluctuations are expected to play a role in this…
Growing experimental evidence indicates that topological defects could serve as organizing centers in the morphogenesis of tissues. Here, we provide a quantitative explanation for this phenomenon, rooted in the buckling theory of deformable…
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 investigate the evolution of a system of colloidal particles, trapped at a fluid interface and interacting via capillary attraction, as function of the range of the capillary interaction and temperature. We address the collapse of an…
Freeze-casting produces materials with complex, three-dimensional pore structures which may be tuned during the solidification process. The range of potential applications of freeze-cast materials is vast, and includes: structural…
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…
The properties of the interface between solid and melt are key to solidification and melting, as the interfacial free energy introduces a kinetic barrier to phase transitions. This makes solidification happen below the melting temperature,…
Rapid solidification leads to unique microstructural features, where a less studied topic is the formation of various crystalline defects, including high dislocation densities, as well as gradients and splitting of the crystalline…
By means of molecular dynamics, we study a model system for colloidal suspensions where the interaction is based on a competition between attraction and repulsion. At low temperatures the relaxation time $\tau$ first increases as a power…
Alloying metals with other elements is often done to improve the material strength or hardness. A key microscopic mechanism is precipitation hardening, where precipitates impede dislocation motion, but the role of such obstacles in…
Colloidal particles with appropriate wetting properties can become very strongly trapped at an interface between two immiscible fluids. We have harnessed this phenomenon to create a new class of soft materials with intriguing and…
Confining a colloidal crystal within a long narrow channel produced by two parallel walls can be used to impose a meso-scale superstructure of a predominantly mechanical elastic character [Chui et al., EPL 2008, 83, 58004]. When the crystal…
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…
Although buckling is a prime route to achieve functionalization and synthesis of single colloids, buckling of colloidal structures---made up of multiple colloids---remains poorly studied. Here, we investigate the buckling of the simplest…
The addition of small amounts of a secondary fluid to a suspension can, through the attractive capillary force, lead to particle bridging and network formation. The capillary bridging phenomenon can be used to stabilize particle suspensions…
We study the self-assembly of colloidal microgel particles at a quasi-two-dimensional air-water interface of a drying droplet. Using bright-field microscopy, we demonstrate that increasing particle elasticity drives interfacial organization…
Fluctuations in fluid velocity and fluctuations in electric fields may both give rise to forces acting on small particles in colloidal suspensions. Such forces in part determine the thermodynamic stability of the colloid. At the classical…
Transitions in structural heterogeneity of colloidal depletion gels formed through short-range attractive interactions are correlated with their dynamical arrest. The system is a density and refractive index matched suspension of 0.20…