No Arabic abstract
In a broad class of complex materials a quench leads to a multi-scaled relaxation process known as aging. To explain its commonality and the astounding insensitivity to most microscopic details, record dynamics (RD) posits that a small set of increasingly rare and irreversible events, so called quakes, controls the dynamics. While key predictions of RD are known to concur with a number of experimental and simulational results, its basic assumption on the nature of quake statistics has proven extremely difficult to verify experimentally. The careful distinction of rare (record) cage-breaking events from in-cage rattle accomplished in previous experiments on jammed colloids, enables us to extract the first direct experimental evidence for the fundamental hypothesis of RD that the rate of quakes decelerates with the inverse of the system age. The resulting description shows the predicted growth of the particle mean square displacement and of a mesoscopic lengthscale with the logarithm of time.
We report observations of stable bound pairs in very dilute deionized aqueous suspensions of highly charged polystyrene colloidal particles, with monovalent counterions, using a confocal laser scanning microscope. Through an analysis of several thousands of time series of confocal images recorded deep inside the bulk suspension, we find that the measured pair-potential, U(r) has a long-range attractive component with well depths larger than the thermal energy. These observations provide a direct and unequivocal evidence for the existence of long-range attraction in U(r) of like-charged colloidal particles.
We construct a theoretical model for the dynamics of a microscale colloidal particle, modeled as an interval, moving horizontally on a DNA-coated surface, modelled as a line coated with springs that can stick to the interval. Averaging over the fast DNA dynamics leads to an evolution equation for the particle in isolation, which contains both friction and diffusion. The DNA-induced friction coefficient depends on the physical properties of the DNA, and substituting parameter values typical of a 1$mu$m colloid coated densely with weakly interacting DNA gives a coefficient about 100 times larger than the corresponding coefficient of hydrodynamic friction. We use a mean-field extension of the model to higher dimensions to estimate the friction tensor for a disc rotating and translating horizontally along a line. When the DNA strands are very stiff and short, the friction coefficient for the disc rolling approaches zero while the friction for the disc sliding remains large. Together, these results could have significant implications for the dynamics of DNA-coated colloids or other ligand-receptor systems, implying that DNA-induced friction between colloids can be stronger than hydrodynamic friction and should be incorporated into simulations, and that it depends nontrivially on the type of relative motion, possibly causing the particles to assemble into out-of-equilibrium metastable states governed by the pathways with the least friction.
We show that a rich variety of dynamic phases can be realized for mono- and bidisperse mixtures of interacting colloids under the influence of a symmetric flashing periodic substrate. With the addition of dc or ac drives, phase locking, jamming, and new types of ratchet effects occur. In some regimes we find that the addition of a non-ratcheting species increases the velocity of the ratcheting particles. We show that these effects occur due to the collective interactions of the colloids.
By means of extensive simulations, we investigate concentrated solutions of globular single-chain nanoparticles (SCNPs), an emergent class of synthetic soft nano-objects. By increasing the concentration, the SCNPs show a reentrant behaviour in their structural and dynamical correlations, as well as a soft caging regime and weak dynamic heterogeneity. The latter is confirmed by validation of the Stokes-Einstein relation up to concentrations far beyond the overlap density. Therefore SCNPs arise as a new class of soft colloids, exhibiting slow dynamics and actualizing in a real system structural and dynamical anomalies proposed by models of ultrasoft particles. Quantitative differences in the dynamical behaviour depend on the SCNP deformability, which can be tuned through the degree of internal cross-linking.
The understanding of how spins move at pico- and femtosecond time scales is the goal of much of modern research in condensed matter physics, with implications for ultrafast and more energy-efficient data storage. However, the limited comprehension of the physics behind this phenomenon has hampered the possibility of realising a commercial technology based on it. Recently, it has been suggested that inertial effects should be considered in the full description of the spin dynamics at these ultrafast time scales, but a clear observation of such effects in ferromagnets is still lacking. Here, we report the first direct experimental evidence of inertial spin dynamics in ferromagnetic thin films in the form of a nutation of the magnetisation at a frequency of approximately 0.6 THz. This allows us to evince that the angular momentum relaxation time in ferromagnets is on the order of 10 ps.