Related papers: Structural and dynamical properties of gel network…
This article discusses recent attempts to provide a deeper understanding of the thermoreversible "gel" state of colloidal matter and to unravel the analogies between gels at the colloidal level and gels at the molecular level, commonly…
Colloidal gels are out-of-equilibrium structures, made up of a rarefied network of colloidal particles. Comparing experiments to numerical simulations, with hydrodynamic interactions switched off, we demonstrate the crucial role of the…
We present molecular dynamics simulations of aggregation kinetics in a colloidal suspension modeled as a highly asymmetric binary mixture. Starting from a configuration with largely uncorrelated colloidal particles the system relaxes by…
We present further evidence that gelation is an arrested phase separation in attractive colloid-polymer mixtures, based on a method combining confocal microscopy experiments with numerical simulations recently established in {\bf Nature…
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…
Attractive colloidal particles can form a disordered elastic solid or gel when quenched into a two-phase region, if the volume fraction is sufficiently large. When the interactions are comparable to thermal energies the stress-bearing…
We present simulation results addressing the dynamics of a colloidal system with attractive interactions close to gelation. Our interaction also has a soft, long range repulsive barrier which suppresses liquid-gas type phase separation at…
Locally (re)structuring colloidal gels $\unicode{x2013}$ micron-sized particles forming a connected network with arrested dynamics $\unicode{x2013}$ enables precise tuning of the micromechanical and -rheological properties of the system. A…
Colloidal gel aging is investigated using very long runs of brownian dynamics simulations. The Asakura Oosawa description of the depletion interaction is used to model a simple colloid polymer mixture. Several regimes are identified during…
We introduce a microscopically realistic model of a physical gel and use computer simulations to study its static and dynamic properties at thermal equilibrium. The phase diagram comprises a sol phase, a coexistence region ending at a…
We use molecular dynamics simulations of a simple model to show that dispersions of slightly elongated colloidal particles with long-range dipolar interactions, like ferrofluids, can form a physical (reversible) gel at low volume fractions.…
We systematically study the relationship between equilibrium and non-equilibrium phase diagrams of a system of short-ranged attractive colloids. Using Monte Carlo and Brownian dynamics simulations we find a window of enhanced…
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…
We use molecular dynamics computer simulations to investigate the relaxation dynamics of a simple model for a colloidal gel at a low volume fraction. We find that due to the presence of the open spanning network this dynamics shows at low…
The binodals and the non-ergodicity lines of a binary mixture of hard sphere-like particles with large size ratio are computed for studying the interplay between dynamic arrest and phase separation in depletion-driven colloidal mixtures.…
Self-propelled particles possessing permanent magnetic dipole moments occur naturally in magnetotactic bacteria and in man-made systems like active colloids or micro-robots. Yet, the interplay between self-propulsion and anisotropic…
The liquid-liquid phase separation of a binary solvent can be arrested by colloidal particles trapped at the interface [K. Stratford et al., Science 309, 5744 (2005)]. We show experimentally that the colloidal network so formed can remain…
Motivated by recent experiments on colloidal systems with competing attractive and repulsive interactions, we simulate a two-dimensional system of colloids with competing interactions that can undergo fragmentation. In the absence of any…
We use large-scale computer simulations to explore the non-equilibrium aging dynamics in a microscopic model for colloidal gels. We find that gelation resulting from a kinetically-arrested phase separation is accompanied by `anomalous'…
We study the aging of colloidal gels using light microscopy movies of depletion gels from the International Space Station. Under such microgravity conditions, we observe a slowdown in particle dynamics consistent with gel aging. Stronger…