Subrata Sanyal

Phase Separation in Binary Nearly-Hard-Sphere Colloids: Evidence for the Depletion Force

A binary aqueous suspension of large (L) and small (S) nearly-hard-sphere colloidal polystyrene spheres is shown to segregate spontaneously into L-rich and S-rich regions for suitable choices of volume fraction and size ratio. This is the first observation of such purely entropic phase separation of chemically identical species in which at least one component remains fluid. Simple theoretical arguments are presented to make this effect plausible.

Cooperative Jump Motions in Colloidal Glass

We report Brownian dynamics simulation results on binary colloidal mixtures of particles of two different diameters interacting via a repulsive DLVO potential. As the effective temperature is lowered by reducing charged impurity concentration, a transition from liquid to crystal at a total volume fraction phi of 0.2 and to glassy state at phi = 0.3 are observed. The mean squared displacements show a marked subdiffusive behavior at intermediate and long times below a certain temperature. The particle motion in supercooled liquid with phi = 0.3 is strongly cooperative as revealed by mean squared displacements, self-part of van-Hove density correlation functions and non-Gaussian parameter. Interestingly, a few particles exhibit cooperative hop and subsequent hop-back motion at temperatures very close to the glass transition.

Diffusing wave spectroscopy of dense colloids: Liquid, crystal and glassy states

Using intensity autocorrelation of multiply scattered light, we show that the increase in interparticle interaction in dense, binary colloidal fluid mixtures of particle diameters 0.115µm and 0.089µm results in freezing into a crystalline phase at volume fractionφ of 0.1 and into a glassy state atφ=0.2. The functional form of the field autocorrelation functiong(1)(t) for the binary fluid phase is fitted to exp[−γ(6k02Defft)1/2] wherek0 is the magnitude of the incident light wavevector andγ is a parameter inversely proportional to the photon transport mean free pathl*. TheDeff is thel* weighted average of the individual diffusion coefficients of the pure species. Thel* used in calculatingDeff was computed using the Mie theory. In the solid (crystal or glass) phase, theg(1)(t) is fitted (only with a moderate success) to exp[−γ(6k02W(t))1/2] where the mean-squared displacementW(t) is evaluated for a harmonically bound overdamped Brownian oscillator. It is found that the fitted parameterγ for both the binary and monodisperse suspensions decreases significantly with the increase of interparticle interactions. This has been justified by showing that the calculated values ofl* in a monodisperse suspension using Mie theory increase very significantly with the interactions incorporated inl* via the static structure factor.