Related papers: Colloidal gelation, percolation and structural arr…
One of the most interesting phenomena in the soft-matter realm consists in the spontaneous formation of super-molecular structures (microphases) in condition of thermodynamic equilibrium. A simple mechanism responsible for this…
Recent studies aimed at investigating artificial analogs of bacterial colonies have shown that low-density suspensions of self-propelled particles confined in two dimensions can assemble into finite aggregates that merge and split, but have…
Concentrated colloidal suspensions are a well-tested model system which has a glass transition. Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high; the…
The nonlinear rheology of glass-forming colloidal suspensions with short-ranged attractions is discussed within the integration-through transients framework combined with the mode-coupling theory of the glass transition (ITT-MCT).…
The interaction between passive and active/driven particles has introduced a new way to control colloidal suspension properties from particle aggregation to crystallization. Here, we focus on the hydrodynamic interaction between a single…
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…
In this chapter, a study of the glass transitions in colloidal systems is presented, in connection with gelation, mainly from theoretical and simulation results. Mode Coupling Theory, which anticipated the existence of attraction driven…
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…
We use a mesoscopic simulation technique to study the effect of short-ranged inter-particle attraction on the steady-state sedimentation of colloidal suspensions. Attractions increase the average sedimentation velocity $v_s$ compared to the…
We implement molecular dynamics simulations in canonical ensemble to study the effect of confinement on a $2d$ crystal of point particles interacting with an inverse power law potential proportional to $r^{-12}$ in a narrow channel. This…
We perform molecular-dynamics simulations of a molecular system in supercooled states for different values of inertia parameters to provide evidence that the long-time dynamics depends only on the equilibrium structure. This observation is…
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…
Suspensions of swimming particles exhibit complex collective behaviors driven by hydrodynamic interactions, showing persistent large-scale flows and long-range correlations. While heavily studied, it remains unclear how such structures…
We investigate the slow dynamics in gelling systems by means of MonteCarlo simulations on the cubic lattice of a minimal statistical mechanics model. By opportunely varying some model parameter we are able to describe a crossover from the…
We present simulation results addressing the phenomena of colloidal gelation induced by attractive interactions. The liquid-gas transition is prevented by the glass arrest at high enough attraction strength, resulting in a colloidal gel.…
The structural description for the intriguing link between the fast vibrational dynamics and slow diffusive dynamics in glass-forming systems is one of the most challenging issues in physical science. Here, in a model of metallic…
We compare the percolation loci for chemical clusters with the liquid-solid transition in the temperature-density phase diagram. Chemical clusters are defined as sets of particles connected through particle-particle bonds that last for a…
In this Rapid Communication we demonstrate the applicability of an augmented Gibbs ensemble Monte Carlo approach for the phase behavior determination of model colloidal systems with short-ranged depletion attraction and long-ranged…
Colloid-polymer mixtures may undergo either fluid-fluid phase separation or gelation. This depends on the depth of the quench (polymer concentration) and polymer-colloid size ratio. We present a real-space study of dynamics in phase…
For several atomistic models of glass formers, at conditions below their glassy dynamics onset temperatures, ${T_\mathrm{o}}$, we use importance sampling of trajectory space to study the structure, statistics and dynamics of excitations…