Many metastable complex fluids such as colloidal glasses and gels show distinct nonlinear viscoelasticity with increasing oscillatory-strain amplitude; the storage modulus decreases monotonically as the strain amplitude increases whereas the loss modulus has a distinct peak before it decreases at larger strains. We present a qualitative argument to explain this ubiquitous behavior and use mode coupling theory (MCT) to confirm it. We compare theoretical predictions to the measured nonlinear viscoelasticity in a dense hard sphere colloidal suspensions; reasonable agreement is obtained. The argument given here can be used to obtain new information about linear viscoelasticity of metastable complex fluids from nonlinear strain measurements.
@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0509121,
title = {Nonlinear viscoelasticity of metastable complex fluids},
author = {Kunimasa Miyazaki and Hans M. Wyss and D. A. Weitz and David R. Reichman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0509121},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
7 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Europhys. Lett