Glasses are structurally liquid-like, but mechanically solid-like. Most attempts to understand glasses start from liquid state theory. Here we take the opposite point of view, and use concepts from solid state physics. We determine the vibrational modes of a colloidal glass experimentally, and find soft low-frequency modes that are very different in nature from the usual acoustic vibrations of ordinary solids. These modes extend over surprisingly large length scales.
When amorphous solids are strained they display elastic deformation at small strain, however, beyond a critical strain they yield and begin to flow plastically. The origin of this plasticity lies in the irreversible rearrangement of particles. Such rearrangements have been shown to give rise to a long-ranged quadrupolar strain field, similar to Eshebly's spherical inclusions. However, their spatio-temporal organisation at finite temperatures and finite shear rate remains unclear. Here, we have investigated the strain field in sheared colloidal glasses. We show that the strain field in homogene…
Motivated by the mean field prediction of a Gardner phase transition between a "normal glass" and a "marginally stable glass", we investigate the off-equilibrium dynamics of three-dimensional polydisperse hard spheres, used as a model for colloidal or granular glasses. Deep inside the glass phase, we find that a sharp crossover pressure $P_{\rm G}$ separates two distinct dynamical regimes. For pressure $P < P_{\rm G}$, the glass behaves as a normal solid, displaying fast dynamics that quickly equilibrates within the glass free energy basin. For $P>P_{\rm G}$, instead, the dynamics becomes stro…
We use an analogue of nanoindentation on a colloidal glass to elucidate the incipient plastic deformation of glasses. By tracking the motion of the individual particles in three dimensions, we visualize the strain field and glass structure during the emerging deformation. At the onset of flow, we observe a power-law distribution of strain indicating strongly correlated deformation, and reflecting a critical state of the glass. At later stages, the strain acquires a Gaussian distribution, indicating that plastic events become uncorrelated. Investigation of the glass structure using both static …
We rejuvenate well-aged quasi-2D binary colloidal glasses by thermal cycling, and systematically measure both the statistical responses and particle-level structural evolutions during rejuvenation. While the moduli and boson peak are continuously rejuvenated with increasing number of cycles, the mean square displacement (MSD) fluctuates significantly between different groups of thermal cycles. The decoupling between the thermodynamical and dynamical evolutions suggests different microscopic origins for different bulk properties of glasses. We find that a small fraction of structural rearrangem…
The flow of colloidal suspensions is ubiquitous in nature and industry. Colloidal suspensions exhibit a wide range of rheological behavior, which should be closely related to the microscopic structure of the systems. With in-situ small-angle neutron scattering complemented by rheological measurements, we investigated the deformation behavior of a charge-stabilized colloidal glass at particle level undergoing steady shear. A short-lived, localized elastic response at particle level, termed as transient elasticity zone (TEZ), was identified from the neutron spectra. The existence of the TEZ is a…
Colloidal particles, which are ubiquitous, have become ideal testing grounds for the structural glass transition (SGT) theories. In these systems glassy behavior is manifested as the density of the particles is increased. Thus, soft colloidal particles with varying degree of softness capture diverse glass forming properties, observed normally in molecular glasses. By performing Brownian dynamics simulations for a binary mixture of micron-sized charged colloidal suspensions, known to form Wigner glasses, we show that by tuning the softness of the potential, achievable by changing the monovalent…
The nature of defects in amorphous materials, analogous to vacancies and dislocations in crystals, remains elusive. Here we explore their nature in a three-dimensional microscopic model glass-former which describes granular, colloidal, atomic and molecular glasses by changing the temperature and density. We find that all glasses evolve in a very rough energy landscape, with a hierarchy of barrier sizes corresponding to both localized and delocalized excitations. Collective excitations dominate in the jamming regime relevant for granular and colloidal glasses. By moving gradually to larger dens…
Exploring structural order in disordered systems including liquids and glasses is an intriguing but challenging issue in condensed matter physics. Here we construct a new parameter based on the angular distribution function of particles and show that this new orientational order has significantly higher correlation with dynamic heterogeneity compared to a translational parameter based on the radial distribution functions in colloidal glasses. The gradual development of orientational and translational order in supercooled liquids shows that the higher correlation between orientational order and…
