2007/12/31 by Pinaki Chaudhuri, Yongxiang Gao, Ludovic Berthier +2 · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Material Dynamics and Properties #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Pickering emulsions and particle stabilization #cond-mat.soft #cond-mat.stat-mech
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0953-8984/20/24/244126
published as J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 20, 244126 (2008) · 13 pages, 5 figs. Submitted to special issue "Classical and Quantum Glasses" of J. Phys.: Condens. Matter; v2: response to referee
arxiv created 2008/01/22 · openalex publication_date 2008/05/29 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
We study the heterogeneous dynamics of attractive colloidal particles close to the gel transition using confocal microscopy experiments combined with a theoretical statistical analysis. We focus on single particle dynamics and show that the self-part of the van Hove distribution function is not the Gaussian expected for a Fickian process, but that it reflects instead the existence, at any given time, of colloids with widely different mobilities. Our confocal microscopy measurements can be described well by a simple analytical model based on a conventional continuous time random walk picture, as already found for several other glassy materials. In particular, the theory successfully accounts for the presence of broad tails in the van Hove distributions that exhibit exponential, rather than Gaussian, decay at large distance.