Aging, yielding, and shear banding in soft colloidal glasses.
Soft colloidal interactions in colloidal glasses are modeled using suspensions of multiarm star polymers. Using a preshearing protocol that ensures a reproducible initial state ("rejuvenation" of the system), we report here the evolution of the flow curve from monotonically increasing to one dominated by a stress plateau, demonstrating a corresponding shear-banded state. Phenomenological understanding is provided through a scalar model that describes the free-energy landscape.
MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnologies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand.
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Rogers
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Vlassopoulos
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Callaghan