Related papers: A new look at effective interactions between micro…
The role of electrostatics on the interfacial properties of polyelectrolyte microgels has been discussed controversially in the literature. It is not yet clear if, or how, Coulomb interactions affect their behavior under interfacial…
Soft particles display highly versatile properties with respect to hard colloids, even more so at fluid-fluid interfaces. In particular, microgels, consisting of a cross-linked polymer network, are able to deform and flatten upon adsorption…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
Controlled crystallization, melting and vitrification are important fundamental processes in nature and technology. However, the microscopic details of these fundamental phenomena still lack understanding, in particular how the cooling rate…
How frictional effects emerge at the microscopic level in particulate materials remains a challenging question, particularly in systems subject to thermal fluctuations due to the transient nature of interparticle contacts. Here, we directly…
Recent progress has been made in the numerical modelling of neutral microgel particles with a realistic, disordered structure. In this work we extend this approach to the case of co-polymerised microgels where a thermoresponsive polymer is…
Thermosensitive microgels are widely studied hybrid systems combining properties of polymers and colloidal particles in a unique way. Due to their complex morphology their interactions and packing, and consequentially the viscoelastcity of…
Microgels made of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) are the prototype of soft, thermoresponsive particles widely used to study fundamental problems in condensed matter physics. However, their internal structure is far from homogeneous, and…
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…
Microgels are colloidal-scale particles individually made of crosslinked polymer networks that can swell and deswell in response to external stimuli, such as changes to temperature or pH. Despite a large amount of experimental activities on…
Single molecule probes are widely used to characterize dynamic heterogeneity in glass forming liquids, but interpreting probe dynamics remains challenging because the measured response depends on how the probe couples to its host…
We investigate dynamical heterogeneities in the collective relaxation of a concentrated microgel system, for which the packing fraction can be conveniently varied by changing the temperature. The packing fraction dependent mechanical…
A simple three-dimensional model of a fluid whose constituent particles interact via a short range attractive and long range repulsive potential is used to model the aggregation into large spherical-like clusters made up of hundreds of…
Surface effects are generally prevailing in confined colloidal systems. Here we report on dispersed nanoparticles close to a fluid membrane. Exact results regarding the static organization are derived for a dilute solution of non-adhesive…
Microgels are soft colloidal particles constituted by cross-linked polymer networks with a high potential for applications. In particular, after adsorption at a fluid interface, interfacial tension provides two-dimensional (2D) confinement…
The macroscopic mechanical properties of colloidal particle gels strongly depend on the local arrangement of the powder particles. Experiments have shown that more heterogeneous microstructures exhibit up to one order of magnitude higher…
Polymer microgels exhibit intriguing macroscopic flow properties arising from their unique microscopic structure. Microgel colloids usually comprise a crosslinked polymer network with a radially decaying density profile, resulting in a…
Microgels are soft microparticles that often exhibit thermoresponsiveness and feature a transformation at a critical temperature, referred to as the volume phase transition temperature. The question of whether this transformation occurs as…
Many suspensions contain particles with complex shapes that are affected not only by hydrodynamics, but also by thermal fluctuations, internal kinematic constraints and other long-range non-hydrodynamic interactions. Modeling these systems…
We study the melting behavior of charged colloidal crystals, using a simulation technique that combines a continuous mean-field Poisson-Boltzmann description for the microscopic electrolyte ions with a Brownian-dynamics simulation for the…