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research article

Arrested demixing opens route to bigels

Varrato, Francesco  orcid-logo
•
Di Michele, Lorenzo
•
Belushkin, Maxim  
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2012
Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America (PNAS)

Understanding and, ultimately, controlling the properties of amorphous materials is one of the key goals of material science. Among the different amorphous structures, a very important role is played by colloidal gels. It has been only recently understood that colloidal gels are the result of the interplay between phase separation and arrest. When short-ranged attractive colloids are quenched into the phase-separating region, density fluctuations are arrested and this results in ramified amorphous space-spanning structures that are capable of sustaining mechanical stress. We present a mechanism of aggregation through arrested demixing in binary colloidal mixtures, which leads to the formation of a yet unexplored class of materials-bigels. This material is obtained by tuning interspecies interactions. Using a computer model, we investigate the phase behavior and the structural properties of these bigels. We show the topological similarities and the geometrical differences between these binary, interpenetrating, arrested structures and their well-known monodisperse counterparts, colloidal gels. Our findings are supported by confocal microscopy experiments performed on mixtures of DNA-coated colloids. The mechanism of bigel formation is a generalization of arrested phase separation and is therefore universal.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1073/pnas.1214971109
Web of Science ID

WOS:000311997200035

Author(s)
Varrato, Francesco  orcid-logo
Di Michele, Lorenzo
Belushkin, Maxim  
Dorsaz, Nicolas  
Nathan, Simon H.
Eiser, Erika
Foffi, Giuseppe  
Date Issued

2012

Publisher

National Academy of Sciences

Published in
Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences Of The United States Of America (PNAS)
Volume

109

Issue

47

Start page

19155

End page

19160

Subjects

spinodal decomposition

•

DNA-coated colloids

•

programmable interactions

•

amorphous self-assembly

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
GR-FO  
Available on Infoscience
March 28, 2013
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/91191
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