2004/04/30 by Stephan M. Dammer, Dietrich E. Wolf
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.93.150602
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 93, 150602 (2004) · 4 pages, 4 figures, minor changes
arxiv created 2004/11/02 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
The Smoluchowski equation for irreversible aggregation in suspensions of equally charged particles is studied. Accumulation of charges during the aggregation process leads to a crossover from power law to sub-logarithmic cluster growth at a characteristic time and cluster size. For larger times the suspension is usually called stable, although aggregation still proceeds slowly. In this regime the size distribution evolves towards a \em universal scaling form, independent of \em any parameter included in the theory. The relative width falls off to a universal value σ\rm r∞≈0.2017 that is much smaller than in the uncharged case. We conjecture that σ\rm r∞ is a lower bound for the asymptotic relative width for all physical systems with irreversible aggregation.