Gelling by Heating

Sandalo Roldan-Vargas , Frank Smallenburg , Walter Kob (1) , Francesco Sciortino

1 L2C - Laboratoire Charles Coulomb

We exploit the concept of competing interactions to design a binary mixture of patchy particles that forms a reversible gel upon heating. Our molecular dynamics computer simulation of such a system shows that with increasing temperature the relaxation dynamics slows down by more than four orders of magnitude and then speeds up again. The system is thus a fluid both at high and at low temperatures and a solid-like disordered open network structure at intermediate temperature. We further discuss the feasibility of realizing a real material with this reversible behavior.

Domaines: Mécanique statistique [cond-mat.stat-mech]; Systèmes désordonnés et réseaux de neurones [cond-mat.dis-nn]

Sandalo Roldan-Vargas, Frank Smallenburg, Walter Kob, Francesco Sciortino. Gelling by Heating. Scientific Reports, 2013, 3, pp.2451. ⟨10.1038/srep02451⟩. ⟨hal-00858675⟩