Related papers: Decoupling Structure and Elasticity in Colloidal G…
Softer means stickier for solid adhesives, because material compliance facilitates close contact between non-conformal surfaces. Recent discoveries have revealed that soft materials can exhibit a rich array of new physics arising from…
The rheology of dense amorphous materials under large shear strain is not fully understood, partly due to the difficulty of directly viewing the microscopic details of such materials. We use a colloidal suspension to simulate amorphous…
The elastic coupling between plastic events is generally invoked to interpret plastic properties and failure of amorphous soft glassy materials. We report an experiment where the emergence of a self-organized plastic flow is observed well…
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…
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…
We have investigated the rheology and structure of a gel formed from a mixture of non-Brownian particles and two immiscible liquids. The suspension of particles in a liquid undergoes gelation upon the addition of a small content of second,…
The physical mechanism of elasticity of liquid surfaces coated with colloidal particles is proposed. It is suggested that particles are separated by water clearings and the capillary interaction between them is negligible. The case is…
Simple models based on isotropic interparticle attractions often fail to capture experimentally observed structures of colloidal gels formed through spinodal decomposition and subsequent arrest: the resulting gels are typically denser and…
Fatigue refers to the changes in material properties caused by repeatedly applied loads. It has been widely studied for, e.g., construction materials, but much less has been done on soft materials. Here, we characterize the fatigue dynamics…
Soft particulate gels include materials we can eat, squeeze, or 3D print. From foods to bio-inks to cement hydrates, these gels are composed of a small amount of particulate matter (proteins, polymers, colloidal particles, or agglomerates…
Colloidal gels formed by strongly attractive particles at low particle volume fractions are composed of space-spanning networks of uniformly sized clusters. We study the thermal fluctuations of the clusters using differential dynamic…
Depending on the volume fraction and interparticle interactions, colloidal suspensions can form different phases, ranging from fluids, crystals, and glasses to gels. For soft microgels that are made from thermoresponsive polymers, the…
We study pattern formation in gels undergoing simultaneous phase separation and orientational ordering. A 2D numerical simulation is performed using a minimal model of nonlinear elasticity with density-anisotropy coupling. For strong…
We present a novel dynamic light scattering setup to probe, with time and space resolution, the microscopic dynamics of soft matter systems confined within millimeter-sized spherical drops. By using an ad-hoc optical layout, we tackle the…
We study the sedimentation of colloidal gels by using a combination of light scattering, polarimetry and video imaging. The asymptotic concentration profiles $\varphi(z,t\rightarrow \infty)$ exhibit remarkable scaling properties: profiles…
We investigate the structure and equilibrium linear-response dynamics of suspensions of hard colloidal dumbbells using Brownian Dynamics computer simulations. The focus lies on the dense fluid and plastic crystal states of the colloids with…
In polymers melts and supercooled liquids, the glassy dynamics is characterized by the rattling of monomers or particles in the cage formed by their neighbors. Recently, a direct correlation in such systems, described by a universal scaling…
The drying of a colloidal dispersion can result in a gel phase defined as a porous matrix saturated in solvent. During the drying process, high mechanical stresses are generated. When these stresses exceed the strength of the material, they…
Spinodal demixing of systems into two phases having very different viscosities leads to viscoelastic networks, i.e. gels. Here we consider demixing in a colloidal system where one phase is a nematic liquid crystal with a strongly…
Using molecular dynamics computer simulations we investigate the aging dynamics of a gel. We start from a fractal structure generated by the DLCA-DEF algorithm, onto which we then impose an interaction potential consisting of a short-range…