0000000000530824
AUTHOR
Tsuneo Okubo
To make a glass—avoid the crystal
Colloidal model systems allow for a flexible tuning of particle sizes, particle spacings and mutual interactions at constant temperature. Colloidal suspensions typically crystallize as soon as the interactions get sufficiently strong and long-ranged. Several strategies have been successfully applied to avoid crystallization and instead produce colloidal glasses. Most of these amorphous solids are formed at high particle concentrations. This paper shortly reviews experimental attempts to produce amorphous colloidal solids using strategies based on topological, thermodynamic and kinetic considerations. We complement this overview by introducing a (transient) amorphous solid forming in a thoro…
Phase behaviour of deionized binary mixtures of charged colloidal spheres.
We review recent work on the phase behaviour of binary charged sphere mixtures as a function of particle concentration and composition. Both size ratios and charge ratios are varied over a wide range. By contrast to hard spheres the long ranged Coulomb interaction stabilizes the crystal phase at low particle concentrations and shifts the occurrence of amorphous solids to particle concentrations considerably larger than the freezing concentration. Depending on size- and charge ratios we observe upper azeotrope, spindle, lower azeotrope and eutectic types of phase diagrams, all known well from metal systems. Most solids are of body centred cubic structure. Occasionally stoichiometric compound…
On the electrophoretic mobility of isolated colloidal spheres
We studied the electrophoretic mobility μ of highly charged colloidal spheres in very dilute low salt aqueous suspension. We combined experiments on individual particles and ensemble averaged measurements. In both cases μ was observed to be independent of particle size and surface chemistry. Corresponding effective charges Zμ*, however, scaled with the ratio of particle size to Bjerrum length λB: Zμ* = Aa/λB with a coefficient . Our results are discussed in comparison to other charge determination experiments and charge renormalization theory and with respect to the issue of charge polydispersity.