2007/07/27 by Annalisa Fierro, A. Fierro, E. Del Gado +4 · 26 citations
Chemistry · Engineering · Materials Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical physics #Chemistry #Chromatography #Cluster (spacecraft) #Cluster size #Colloid #Composite material #Computational chemistry #Crowding #Dynamical heterogeneity #Fraction (chemistry) #Glass transition #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials science #Mathematics #Molecular dynamics #Monomer #Phase Equilibria and Thermodynamics #Physical chemistry #Physics #Pickering emulsions and particle stabilization #Plateau (mathematics) #Polymer #Thermodynamics #Volume (thermodynamics) #Volume fraction #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/2008/04/l04002
published in Journal of Statistical Mechanics Theory and Experiment 2008(04), L04002 (Institute of Physics) · 4 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2007/07/27 · openalex publication_date 2008/04/08 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We study the formation of a colloidal gel by means of molecular dynamics simulations of a model for colloidal suspensions. A slowing down with gel-like features is observed at low temperatures and low volume fractions, due to the formation of persistent structures. We show that at low volume fraction the dynamical susceptibility, which describes dynamical heterogeneities, exhibits a large plateau, dominated by clusters of long living bonds. At higher volume fraction, where the effect of the crowding of the particles starts to be present, it crosses over towards a regime characterized by a peak. We introduce a suitable mean cluster size of clusters of monomers connected by 'persistent' bonds which well describes the dynamical susceptibility.