Soft Matter
Concepts, Phenomena, and Applications
4. Colloids
The additional material is organized according to book sections and it includes links to (review) papers mentioned in the book, videos of different phenomena we discuss (experiments and simulations), as well as links to online lectures that address certain topics in more details.
A gallery of colloidal particles from Sacanna lab (the first two images), Kraft lab (the second two images) and Kegel lab (the last image).
4.1 Colloidal dispersions and emulsions
A short video from the Sacanna Lab explaining how patchy colloids are made.
4.2 Colloids as thermodynamic systems with effective interactions
Growth of a colloidal crystal illustrates colloids as a thermodynamic system. Note the Brownian motion of the colloids in the fluid phase.
Three lectures by Daan Frenkel entitled Order, Disorder and Entropy, From self-assembly to cell recognition, and Entropy production and phoretic transport.
4.3 Attractive forces between colloids
A lecture from Sacanna Lab on assembly of colloidal crystals.
A lecture on the Van Der Waals forces.
From The Organic Chemistry Tutor.
An elementary lecture by Remco Tuinier on depletion interactions.
4.4 Repulsive forces
A lecture on Debye-Hückel screening.
From Abishek Pathak.
A seminar by Ted Hueckel on self-assembly of colloidal ionic crystals.
4.5 Playing with colloids as model systems
Different lectures and videos about fractals. Left: From Sigma Documentaries. Middle: From MITK12Videos. Right: TED talk by Benoit Mandelbrot.
- A nice simulation of the process known as diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) — a kinetic process driven by randomly diffusing particles that gives rise to fractal structures like those seen in natural systems (see videos above) — can be found here. You can play with the inputs and observe the patterns.
- On his webpage Michael Fogleman gives access many interesting computational projects, including one on DLA.
A lecture by Rajesh Ganapathy on colloidal glasses. From ICTS.
A lecture by Chad Mirkin on “Colloidal Crystal Engineering with DNA”.
From Kavli Institute Caltech.
A lecture by Christopher Wirth on Janus particles. From Wirth Lab.
A lecture by Andrea Liu on “How glasses relax and go with the flow”. From Center for Advanced Mathematical Sciences.
Four lectures by Patrick Charbonneau on glasses at the UMass Summerschool.
Lecture 1, Lecture 2, Lecture 3, Lecture 4.
4.6 Non-Newtonian rheology of dispersions
- For an overview of the rheology of non-spherical colloidal particles, see A review of shaped colloidal particles in fluids: Anisotropy and chirality by Thomas Witten and Haim Diamant in Rep. Prog. Phys. 83 116601, 2020.
A 3d granular flow simulation.
From Sergei Klishin.
Surface flow in a sheared granular material from the van Hecke lab.
A simulation of a rotating drum filled with granular matter. From Becker 3D.
Four lectures on the Dense Granular State by Karen Daniels, given at the 2024 Amherst summer school on Soft Solids and Complex fluids. Lecture 1, Lecture 2, Lecture 3, Lecture 4. Slides are also available from the school’s website.
Problems
Problem 4.12: tutorial on RG analysis of percolation.
From Samantha von Bibra.
Lecture by Mehran Kardar on Real Space Renormalization. From MIT Open Course Ware.
Coding Problems
Our aim is to make coding problems available for all chapters, including this one, by the end of 2025.