Fast Crystals and Strong Glasses
- Harvard
This talk describes new results on model colloid systems that provide insight into the behavior of fundamental problems in colloid physics, and more generally, for other materials as well. By visualizing the nucleation and growth of colloid crystals, we find that the incipient crystallites are much more disordered than expected, leading to a larger diversity of crystal morphologies. When the entropic contribution of these diverse morphologies is included in the free energy, we are able to describe the behavior very well, and can predict the nucleation rate surprisingly accurately. The talk also describes the glass transition in deformable colloidal particles, and will show that when the internal elasticity of the particles is included, the colloidal glass transition mimics that of molecular glass formers much more completely. These results also suggest that the elasticity at the scale of the fundamental unit, either colloid particle or molecule, determines the nature of the glass transition, as described by the "fragility."
- Research Organization:
- Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- ACO2-06CH11357
- OSTI ID:
- 1007261
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: APS Colloquium Series, Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Illinois (United States), presented on November 04, 2009
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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