Related papers: Colloidal gelation, percolation and structural arr…
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…
Rigidity percolation (RP) occurs when mechanical stability emerges in disordered networks as constraints or components are added. Here we discuss RP with structural correlations, an effect ignored in classical theories albeit relevant to…
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…
Attractive colloids diffuse and aggregate to form gels, solid-like particle networks suspended in a fluid. Gravity is known to strongly impact the stability of gels once they are formed. However, its effect on the process of gel formation…
Using computer simulations, we study the dynamic arrest in a schematic model of colloid-polymer mixtures combining short-ranged attractions with long-ranged repulsions. The arrested gel is a dilute rigid network of colloidal particles…
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…
Colloid-polymer mixtures can undergo spinodal decomposition into colloid-rich and colloid-poor regions. Gelation results when interconnected colloid-rich regions solidify. We show that this occurs when these regions undergo a glass…
Dispersed colloidal particles within a suspension can aggregate and spontaneously self-organize into a robust, percolating structure known as a gel. These network-like structures are prevalent in nature and play a critical role in many…
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…
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…
Computer simulations were used to study the gel transition occurring in colloidal systems with short range attractions. A colloid-polymer mixture was modelled and the results were compared with mode coupling theory expectations and with the…
We consider the sedimentation of a colloidal gel under confinement in the direction of gravity. The confinement allows us to compare directly experiments and computer simulations, for the same system size in the vertical direction. The…
Glass-forming materials are characterized by an intermittent motion at the microscopic scale. Particles spend most of their time rattling within the cages formed by their neighbors, and seldom jump to a different cage. In molecular glass…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown 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…
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…
We investigate the competition between spinodal decomposition and dynamical arrest using aqueous solutions of the globular protein lysozyme as a model system for colloids with short-range attractions. We show that quenches below a…
We present an approximation scheme to the master kinetic equations for aggregation and gelation with thermal breakup in colloidal systems with variable attraction energy. With the cluster fractal dimension $d_{f}$ as the only…
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…
Gels in soft-matter systems are an important nonergodic state of matter. We study a colloid-polymer mixture which is quenched by increasing the polymer concentration, from a fluid to a gel. Using confocal microscopy, we study both the…