2009/01/31 by Alessio Zaccone, Hua Wu, Emanuela Del Gado · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.soft
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.103.208301
3 figures, revised version, to appear in Physical Review Letters
arxiv created 2009/10/27 · arxiv updated 2015/05/12
We evaluate the elasticity of arrested short-ranged attractive colloids by combining an analytically solvable elastic model with a hierarchical arrest scheme into a new approach, which allows to discriminate the microscopic (primary particle-level) from the mesoscopic (cluster-level) contribution to the macroscopic shear modulus. The results quantitatively predict experimental data in a wide range of volume fractions and indicate in which cases the relevant contribution is due to mesoscopic structures. On this basis we propose that different arrested states of short-ranged attractive colloids can be meaningfully distinguished as homogeneous or heterogeneous colloidal glasses in terms of the length-scale which controls their elastic behavior.