No Arabic abstract
We study the effect of shear on the aging dynamics of a colloidal suspension of synthetic clay particles. We find that a shear of amplitude $gamma$ reduces the relaxation time measured just after the cessation of shear by a factor $exp(-gamma/gamma_c)$, with $gamma_c sim 5%$, and is independent of the duration and the frequency of the shear. This simple law for the rejuvenation effect shows that the energy involved in colloidal rearrangements is proportional to the shear amplitude, $gamma$, rather than $gamma^2$, leading to an Eyring-like description of the dynamics of our system.
The complex behavior of confined fluids arising due to a competition between layering and local packing can be disentangled by considering quasi-confined liquids, where periodic boundary conditions along the confining direction restore translational invariance. This system provides a means to investigate the interplay of the relevant length scales of the confinement and the local order. We provide a mode-coupling theory of the glass transition (MCT) for quasi-confined liquids and elaborate an efficient method for the numerical implementation. The nonergodicity parameters in MCT are compared to computer-simulation results for a hard-sphere fluid. We evaluate the nonequilibrium-state diagram and investigate the collective intermediate scattering function. For both methods, nonmonotonic behavior depending on the confinement length is observed.
Colloidal dispersions of Laponite platelets are known to age slowly from viscous sols to colloidal glasses. We follow this aging process by monitoring the diffusion of probe particles embedded in the sample via dynamic light scattering. Our results show that the time-dependent diffusion of the probe particles scales with their size. This implies that the fluctuation-dissipation theorem can be generalized for this out-of-equilibrium system by replacing the bath temperature with an effective temperature. Simultaneous dynamic rheological measurements reveal that this effective temperature increases as a function of aging time and frequency. This suggests the existence of two regimes: at probed time scales longer than the characteristic relaxation time of the Laponite dispersion, the system thermalizes with the bath, whereas at shorter time scales, the system is out-of-equilibrium with an effective temperature greater than the bath temperature.
Effects of temperature changes on the nonequilibrium spin-glass dynamics of a strongly interacting ferromagnetic nanoparticle system (superspin glass) are studied. In contrary to atomic spin glasses, strong cooling rate effects are observed, and no evidence for temperature-chaos is found. The flip time of a magnetic moment is much longer than that of an atomic spin and hence much shorter time scales are probed within the experimental time window for a superspin glass than for an atomic spin glass. Within a real space picture the cumulative aging observed for the superspin glass can be explained considering that all investigated length scales are shorter than the temperature-chaos overlap length. The transient relaxation, observed in experiments after temperature changes, can be understood as the adjustment of thermally active droplets, which is mutatis mutandis the Kovacs effect observed in most glassy systems.
Thermally induced particle flow in a charged colloidal suspension is studied in a fluid-mechanical approach. The force density acting on the charged boundary layer is derived in detail. From Stokes equation with no-slip boundary conditions at the particle surface, we obtain the particle drift velocity and the thermophoretic transport coefficients. The results are discussed in view of previous work and available experimental data.
G. Brambilla et al. Reply to a Comment by J. Reinhardt et al. questioning the existence of equilibrium dynamics above the critical volume fraction of colloidal hard spheres predicted by mode coupling theory.