C60: the first one-component gel?

Abstract

Until now, gels have been formed of multicomponent soft matter systems, consisting of a solvent and one or more macromolecular or colloidal species. Here we show that, for sufficient quench rates, the Girifalco model of C60 can form gels which we identify by their slow dynamics and long-lived network structure. These gels are stable at room temperature, at least on the simulation timescale up to 100 ns. At moderate temperatures around 1000 K, below the bulk glass transition temperature, C60 exhibits crystallisation and phase separation proceeds without the dynamical arrest associated with gelation, in contrast to many colloidal systems.

Accepted by J. Phys. Chem. C. special issue 'Clusters in complex fluids'

References in corpus (4)

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• The role of quench rate in colloidal gels
• The effect of boundary adaptivity on hexagonal ordering and bistability in circularly confined quasi hard discs
• Particle-resolved dynamics during multilayer growth of C${}_{60}$
• Multiscale modelling of structure formation of C${}_{60}$ on insulating CaF${}_2$ substrates