2024/10/14 by Johann Henry, Henry, Justine, Ludovic Feige +4
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Material Dynamics and Properties #Materials Science (cond-mat.mtrl-sci) #Micro and Nano Robotics #Particle Dynamics in Fluid Flows #Soft Condensed Matter (cond-mat.soft)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2410.11102
openalex publication_date 2024/10/14 · openalex created_date 2024/10/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Soft particulate glasses are dense suspensions of jammed particles that flow like liquids under external shear and recover their solid-like properties almost instantly upon flow cessation. Here, we consider a dense suspension of core-shell attractive particles whose polymer brush allows for a delayed recovery that we monitor by time-resolved mechanical spectroscopy. Viscoelastic spectra recorded upon flow cessation show a striking power-law behavior and can be rescaled onto a master curve that hints at a time-connectivity superposition principle. Additionally, the non-linear response of this soft glass, measured at various aging times, shows a ductile-to-brittle transition, which suggests that the interactions between the particles display a progressive repulsive-to-attractive transition. These results depict an original scenario for the delayed recovery involving a time-dependent interaction potential in which attractive hydrophobic forces are only activated when neighboring particles deform their polymer shell and come in close contact.