Related papers: Void structure and cage dynamics in concentrated s…
We study bidisperse colloidal suspensions confined within glass microcapillary tubes to model the glass transition in confined cylindrical geometries. We use high speed three-dimensional confocal microscopy to observe particle motions for a…
Using molecular dynamics computer simulations we investigate the structural and dynamical properties of a simple model for a colloidal gel at low volume fraction. We find that at low T the system is forming an open percolating cluster,…
The dynamical arrest of gels is the consequence of a well defined structural phase transition, leading to the formation of a spanning cluster of bonded particles. The dynamical glass transition, instead, is not accompanied by any clear…
Results of the idealized mode-coupling theory for the structural relaxation in suspensions of hard-sphere colloidal particles are presented and discussed with regard to recent light scattering experiments. The structural relaxation becomes…
The slow dynamics in a glassy hard-sphere system is dominated by cage breaking events, i.e., rearrangements where a particle escapes from the cage formed by its neighboring particles. We study such events for an overdamped colloidal system…
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…
The dynamics of a system composed of inelastic hard spheres or disks that are confined between two parallel vertically vibrating walls is studied (the vertical direction is defined as the direction perpendicular to the walls). The distance…
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…
Hard-sphere colloids are popular as models for testing fundamental theories in condensed matter and statistical physics, from crystal nucleation to the glass transition. A single parameter, the volume fraction (phi), characterizes an ideal,…
The dynamical glass transition is typically taken to be the temperature at which a glassy liquid is no longer able to equilibrate on experimental timescales. Consequently, the physical properties of these systems just above or below the…
The settling of heavy spherical particles in a column of quiescent fluid is investigated. The performed experiments cover a range of Galileo numbers ($110 \leq \text{Ga} \leq 310$) for a fixed density ratio of $\Gamma = \rho_p/\rho_f =…
We investigate the dynamics of a glass forming 2D colloidal mixture and show the existence of collective motions of the particles. We introduce a mean square displacement MSD with respect to the nearest neighbors which shows remarkable…
We determine the structure of charge-stabilized colloidal suspensions at low ionic strength over an extended range of particle volume fractions using a combination of light and small angle neutron scattering experiments. The variation of…
We report a detailed experimental study of the structure and dynamics of glassy states in hard spheres with short-range attraction. The system is a suspension of nearly-hard-sphere colloidal particles and non-adsorbing linear polymer which…
We analyze static point-to-set correlations in glass-forming liquids. The generic idea is to freeze the position of a set of particles in an equilibrium configuration and to perform sampling in the presence of this additional constraint.…
Colloidal mixtures represent a versatile model system to study transport in complex environments. They allow for a systematic variation of the control parameters, namely size ratio, total volume fraction and composition. We study the…
Glassy dynamics is intermittent, as particles suddenly jump out of the cage formed by their neighbours, and heterogeneous, as these jumps are not uniformly distributed across the system. Relating these features of the dynamics to the…
Using Brownian dynamics computer simulations we show that a two-dimensional suspension of self-propelled ("active") colloidal particles crystallizes at sufficiently high densities. Compared to the equilibrium freezing of passive particles…
We use molecular dynamics computer simulations to investigate the relaxation dynamics of a simple model for a colloidal gel at a low volume fraction. We find that due to the presence of the open spanning network this dynamics shows at low…
In a recent publication we established an analogy between the free energy of a hard sphere system and the energy of an elastic network [1]. This result enables one to study the free energy landscape of hard spheres, in particular to define…