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The simplicity of hard spheres as a model system is deceptive. Although the particles interact solely through volume exclusion, that nevertheless suffices for a wealth of static and dynamical phenomena to emerge, making the model an…
Studies of random close packing of spheres have advanced our knowledge about the structure of systems such as liquids, glasses, emulsions, granular media, and amorphous solids. When these systems are confined their structural properties…
Confinement can have a dramatic effect on the behavior of all sorts of particulate systems and it therefore is an important phenomenon in many different areas of physics and technology. Here, we investigate the role played by the softness…
The dynamics of dense particle packings near the jamming transition is characterized by correlated particle motion. The growth of dynamical heterogeneities, or strong spatial variations in the motion of the particles constituting the…
In the wake of previous studies on the rattling-and-jumping diffusion in smectic liquid crystal phases of colloidal rods, we analyze here for the first time the heterogeneous dynamics in columnar phases. More specifically, we perform…
Confining a colloidal crystal within a long narrow channel produced by two parallel walls can be used to impose a meso-scale superstructure of a predominantly mechanical elastic character [Chui et al., EPL 2008, 83, 58004]. When the crystal…
The formation of correlated structures is of importance in many diverse contexts such as strongly coupled plasmas, soft matter, and even biological mediums. In all these contexts the dynamics are mainly governed by electrostatic…
We explore quantitative descriptors that herald when a many-particle system in $d$-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$ approaches a hyperuniform state as a function of the relevant control parameter. We establish quantitative…
By means of molecular dynamics, we study the structure and the dynamics of a microscopic model for colloidal gels at low volume fractions. The presence of directional interactions leads to the formation of a persistent interconnected…
Glasses are structurally liquid-like, but mechanically solid-like. Most attempts to understand glasses start from liquid state theory. Here we take the opposite point of view, and use concepts from solid state physics. We determine the…
We study how confining the equilibrium hard-sphere fluid to restrictive one- and two-dimensional channels with smooth interacting walls modifies its structure, dynamics, and entropy using molecular dynamics and transition-matrix Monte Carlo…
Molecular-dynamics simulations of a liquid of short linear molecules have been performed to investigate the correlation between the particle dynamics in the cage of the neighbors and the local geometry. The latter is characterized in terms…
Over times shorter than that required for relaxation of enthalpy, a liquid can exhibit striking heterogeneities. The picture of these heterogeneities is complex with transient patches of rigidity, irregular yet persistent, intersected by…
The dynamics of supercooled liquids slow down and become increasingly heterogeneous as they are cooled. Recently, local structural variables identified using machine learning, such as "softness", have emerged as predictors of local…
The overall goal of this thesis is to investigate the connection between the dynamics and structure of molecular glass formers, by testing different scaling laws for both. The inspiration for this work is the Isomorph theory because it…
Several physical systems in condensed matter have been modeled approximating their constituent particles as hard objects. The hard spheres model has been indeed one of the cornerstones of the computational and theoretical description in…
The evolution of suspension drops sedimenting under gravity in a viscous fluid close to a vertical wall was studied experimentally and numerically with the use of the point-force model, in the Stokes flow regime. The fluid inside and…
Soft-granular media, such as dense emulsions, foams or tissues, exhibit either fluid- or solid-like properties depending on the applied external stresses. Whereas bulk rheology of such materials has been thoroughly investigated, the…
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…
We show that one may view the self and the distinct part of the van Hove dynamic correlation function of a simple fluid as the one-body density distributions of a binary mixture that evolve in time according to dynamical density functional…