Related papers: Aging of colloidal gels in microgravity
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 aging in a colloidal suspension consisting of micron-sized particles in a liquid. This system is made glassy by increasing the particle concentration. We observe samples composed of particles of two sizes, with a size ratio of…
Colloidal gels undergo a phenomenon known as physical aging, i.e., a continuous change of their physical properties with time after the gel point. To date, most of the research effort on aging in gels has been focused on suspensions of hard…
Colloidal gels have strong industrial relevance as they can behave liquid- and solid-like. The latter allows them to support the buoyant weight against gravity. However, the system is intrinsically out-of-equilibrium, which means that the…
Colloidal gels constitute an important class of materials found in many contexts and with a wide range of applications. Yet as matter far from equilibrium, gels exhibit a variety of time-dependent behaviours, which can be perplexing, such…
We use a combination of original light scattering techniques and particles with unique optical properties to investigate the behavior of suspensions of attractive colloids under gravitational stress, following over time the concentration…
We report on the differences between colloidal systems left to evolve in the earth's gravitational field and the same systems for which a slow continuous rotation averaged out the effects of particle sedimentation on a distance scale small…
We report measurements of the frequency-dependent shear moduli of aging colloidal systems that evolve from a purely low-viscosity liquid to a predominantly elastic glass or gel. Using microrheology, we measure the local complex shear…
Colloidal gels are elasto-plastic materials composed of an out-of-equilibrium, self-assembled network of micron-sized (solid) particles suspended in a fluid. Recent work has shown that far-field hydrodynamic interactions do not change gel…
A coarse-grained model of dense hard sphere colloids building on simple notions of particle mobility and spatial coherence is presented and shown to reproduce results of experiments and simulations for key quantities such as the…
The competition of depletion attractions and longer-ranged repulsions between colloidal particles in colloid-polymer mixtures leads to the formation of heterogeneous gel-like structures. For instance, gel networks, i.e., states where the…
We consider gelation of colloidal particles in suspension after cessation of shear flow. Particle aggregation is driven by a temperature-tunable attractive potential which controls the growth of clusters under isothermal conditions. A…
We use confocal microscopy to directly visualize the dynamics of aging colloidal glasses. We prepare a colloidal suspension at high density, a simple model system which shares many properties with other glasses, and initiate experiments by…
The far-from-equilibrium dynamics of glassy systems share important phenomenological traits. A transition is generally observed from a time-homogeneous dynamical regime to an aging regime where physical changes occur intermittently and, on…
We report, for the first time, some experimental observations regarding a new type of long range interaction between rigid particles that prevails when they are suspended in an soft elastic gel. A denser particle submerges itself to a…
We exploit the controlled drying of millimeter-sized gel beads to investigate isotropic compression of colloidal fractal gels. Using a custom dynamic light scattering setup, we demonstrate that stresses imposed by drying on the bead surface…
Metastable gels formed by weakly attractive colloidal particles display a distinctive two-stage time-dependent settling behavior under their own weight. Initially a space-spanning network is formed that for a characteristic time, which we…
We show that the aging of the mechanical relaxation of a gelatin gel exhibits the same scaling phenomenology as polymer and colloidal glasses. Besides, gelatin is known to exhibit logarithmic structural aging (stiffening). We find that…
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 study light-activated quasi-2d gels made of a colloidal network doped with Janus particles. Following the gel formation, the internal dynamics of the gel are monitored before, during, and after the light activation. We monitor both the…