Dynamical arrest and replica symmetry breaking in attractive colloids

Abstract

Within the Replica Symmetry Breaking (RSB) framework developed by M.Mezard and G.Parisi we investigate the occurrence of structural glass transitions in a model of fluid characterized by hard sphere repulsion together with short range attraction. This model is appropriate for the description of a class of colloidal suspensions. The transition line in the density-temperature plane displays a reentrant behavior, in agreement with Mode Coupling Theory (MCT), a dynamical approach based on the Mori-Zwanzig formalism. Quantitative differences are however found, together with the absence of the predicted glass-glass transition at high density. We also perform a systematic study of the pure hard sphere fluid in order to ascertain the accuracy of the adopted method and the convergence of the numerical procedure.

7 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Theoretical perspective on the glass transition and amorphous materials
• Mean field theory of hard sphere glasses and jamming
• Mode-Coupling Theory as a Mean-Field Description of the Glass Transition
• A thermodynamic description of colloidal glasses
• Packing hard spheres with short-range attraction in infinite dimension: Phase structure and algorithmic implications