Related papers: Stiffening attractive suspensions with solid inclu…
We study experimentally and theoretically the sedimentation of gels made of strongly aggregated colloidal particles, focussing on the long time behavior, when mechanical equilibrium is asymptotically reached. The asymptotic gel height is…
Recent literature indicates that attractive interactions between particles of a dense liquid play a secondary role in determining its bulk mechanical properties. Here we show that, in contrast with their apparent unimportance to the bulk…
Suspensions of attractive particles form space-spanning networks that endow the suspension with solid-like behavior at rest. The microstructure of these colloidal gels depends sensitively on the shear history and on the path followed across…
Mechanical properties of disordered materials are governed by their underlying free energy landscape. In contrast to external fields, embedding a small fraction of active particles within a disordered material generates non-equilibrium…
In the vicinity of their glass transition, dense colloidal suspensions acquire elastic properties over experimental timescales. We investigate the possibility of a visco-elastic flow instability in curved geometry for such materials. To…
Colloidal gels have unique mechanical and transport properties that stem from their bicontinous nature, in which a colloidal network is intertwined with a viscous solvent, and have found numerous applications in foods, cosmetics,…
Numerous soft materials jam into an amorphous solid at high packing fraction. This non-equilibrium phase transition is best understood in the context of a model system in which particles repel elastically when they overlap. Recently,…
We consider the link between fragility and elasticity that follows from analysis of the data for a set of soft-colloid materials consisting of deformable spheres reported by Mattsson et. al., in Nature vol 462, 83 (2009). Fragility index…
Extra-large deformations in ultra-soft elastic materials are ubiquitous, yet systematic studies and methods to understand the mechanics of such huge strains are lacking. Here we investigate this complex problem systematically with a simple…
Bicontinuous, interfacially jammed emulsion gels (bijels) represent a class of soft solid materials in which interpenetrating domains of two immiscible fluids are stabilized by an interfacial colloidal monolayer. Such structures can be…
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…
Elastic waves propagating at the interface of soft solids can be altered by the presence of external forces such as capillarity or gravity. We measure the dispersion relation of waves at the free surface of agarose gels with great accuracy,…
Many practically relevant materials combine properties of viscous fluids and elastic solids to viscoelastic behavior. Our focus is on the induced dynamic behavior of damped finite-sized particulate inclusions in such substances. We…
Surface stresses have recently emerged as a key player in the mechanics of highly compliant solids. The classic theories of contact mechanics describe adhesion with a compliant substrate as a competition between surface energies driving…
Experimentally measuring the elastic properties of thin biological surfaces is non-trivial, particularly when they are curved. One technique that may be used is the indentation of a thin sheet of material by a rigid indenter, whilst…
We show that the formation of a gel by conducting colloidal particles leads to a dramatic enhancement in bulk conductivity, due to inter-particle electron tunneling, combining predictions from molecular dynamics simulations with structural…
Recent experiments have shown that surface stresses in soft materials can have a significant strain-dependence. Here we explore the implications of this surface elasticity to show how, and when, we expect it to arise. We develop the…
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…
Phase transitions and collective dynamics of active colloidal suspensions are fascinating topics in soft matter physics, particularly for out-of-equilibrium systems, which can lead to rich rheological behaviours in the presence of steady…
Active gels play an important role in biology and in inspiring biomimetic active materials, due to their ability to change shape, size and create their own morphology; the relevant mechanics behind these changes is driven by…