Microscopy and particle-based simulations are both powerful techniques to study aggregated particulate matter such as colloidal gels. The data provided by these techniques often contains information on a wide array of length scales, but structural analysis methods typically focus on the local particle arrangement, even though the data also contains information about the particle network on the mesoscopic length scale. In this paper, we present a MATLAB software package for quantifying mesoscopic network structures in colloidal samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFColloidal gels formed by colloid-polymer mixtures with an intermediate volume fraction (ϕ ≈ 0.4) are investigated by confocal microscopy. In addition, we have performed Monte Carlo simulations based on a simple effective pair potential that includes a short-range attractive contribution representing depletion interactions, and a longer-range repulsive contribution describing the electrostatic interactions due to the presence of residual charges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFColloidal particles were exposed to a random potential energy landscape that has been created optically via a speckle pattern. The mean particle density as well as the potential roughness, i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF