In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019, vol. 116, no. 16, p. 7766–7771
Motivated by improvements in diffusing wave spectroscopy (DWS) for nonergodic, highly optically scattering soft matter and by cursory treatment of collective scattering effects in prior DWS microrheology experiments, we investigate the low-frequency plateau elastic shear moduli G′p of concentrated, monodisperse, disordered oil-in- water emulsions as droplets jam. In such experiments, the...
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In: Nanoscale, 2018, vol. 10, no. 47, p. 22189–22195
The realization of non-close-packed nanoscale patterns with multiple feature sizes and length scales via colloidal self-assembly is a highly challenging task. We demonstrate here the creation of a variety of tunable particle arrays by harnessing the sequential self-assembly and deposition of two differently sized microgel particles at the fluid–fluid interface. The two-step process is...
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In: Physical Review E, 2018, vol. 98, no. 6, p. 063104
Solid-solid phase transitions are commonly encountered at the atomic scale in alloys and in superatomic mesoscopic systems of colloidal particles. Here we investigate a solid-solid phase transition occurring at the macroscopic scale between lattices of liquid jets with different symmetries generated by convection in a horizontal layer of a binary liquid mixture. In the absence of a shear...
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In: Colloids and Surfaces A: Physicochemical and Engineering Aspects, 2018, vol. 546, p. 360–365
We study the Brownian thermal motion of a colloidal model system made by emulsifying hot liquid α-eicosene wax into an aqueous surfactant solution of sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS). When this waxy oil-in-water emulsion is cooled below α- eicosene's melting point of Tc ≃ 25 °C, the microscale emulsion droplets solidify, effectively yielding a dispersed particulate system. So, the...
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In: Science Advances, 2017, vol. 3, no. 10, p. e1700969
Tuning the solubility of fuzzy polymer microgels by external triggers, such as temperature or pH, provides a unique mechanism for controlling the porosity and size of colloidal particles on the nanoscale. As a consequence, these smart microgel particles are being considered for applications ranging from viscosity modifiers and sensing to drug delivery and as models for the glass and the...
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In: Scientific Reports, 2017, vol. 7, no. 1, p. 13879
In quenched disordered out-of-equilibrium many-body colloidal systems, there are important distinctions between the glass transition, which is related to the onset of nonergodicity and loss of low-frequency relaxations caused by crowding, and the jamming transition, which is related to the dramatic increase in elasticity of the system caused by the deformation of constituent objects. For...
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In: Korea-Australia Rheology Journal, 2017, vol. 29, no. 4, p. 241–247
Diffusing wave spectroscopy (DWS) can be employed as an optical rheology tool with numerous applications for studying the structure, dynamics and linear viscoelastic properties of complex fluids, foams, glasses and gels. To carry out DWS measurements, one first needs to quantify the static optical properties of the sample under investigation, i.e. the transport mean free path l* and the...
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In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2017, vol. 114, no. 36, p. 9570–9574
Disordered dielectric materials with structural correlations show unconventional optical behavior: They can be transparent to long-wavelength radiation, while at the same time have isotropic band gaps in another frequency range. This phenomenon raises fundamental questions concerning photon transport through disordered media. While optical transparency in these materials is robust against...
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In: Optica, 2017, vol. 4, no. 3, p. 361–366
Hyperuniform disordered networks belong to a peculiar class of structured materials predicted to display isotropic complete photonic bandgaps for a refractive index contrast larger than 3. The practical realization of such photonic designer materials is challenging, however, as it requires control over a multi-step fabrication process on optical length scales. Here we report the direct-laser...
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In: Physical Review A, 2016, vol. 94, no. 4, p. 043832
We study the statistics of the fluorescence decay rates for single quantum emitters embedded in a scattering medium undergoing a phase transition. Under certain circumstances, the structural properties of the scattering medium explore a regime in which the system dynamically switches between two different phases. While in that regime the light-scattering properties of both phases are hardly...
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