This article discusses recent attempts to provide a deeper understanding of the thermoreversible ”gel” state of colloidal matter and to unravel the analogies between gels at the colloidal level and gels at the molecular level, commonly known as network-forming strong liquids. The connection between gel-forming patchy colloids and strong liquids is provided by the limited valence of the inter-pa...

Photochemical reactions in the solid state can be scaled up from a few milligrams to 10 grams by using colloidal suspensions of a photoactive molecular crystal prepared by the solvent shift method. Pure products are recovered by filtration, and the use of H(2)O as a suspension medium makes this method a very attractive one from a green chemistry perspective. Using the photodecarbonylation of di...

We study concentrated colloidal suspensions, a model system which has a glass transition. The non-equilibrium nature of the glassy state is most clearly highlighted by aging – the dependence of the system’s properties on the time elapsed since vitrification. Fast laser scanning confocal microscopy allows us to image a colloidal glass and track the particles in three dimensions. We analyze the s...

Using the scanning transmission X-ray microscope at BESSY II, colloidal structures from a Chernozem soil have been studied with a spatial resolution around 60 nm and a spectral resolution of 1,700 at the K-absorption edge of carbon. Elemental mapping has been used to determine the distribution of organic matter within the colloidal structures. Spectra have been extracted from image stacks to ob...

We propose an adaptation of the osmotic stress technique for determining equations of state of colloids covered by polymer films. We describe here the case of silica particles covered by 6 or 7 layers of polyelectrolyte multilayers. The establishment of a pressure-distance curve allows the interpretation of colloidal interactions over more than four orders of magnitude in pressure. This large r...

We propose a simple theory for the pair distribution function of a sheared colloidal suspension. The starting point is an exact equation for the stationary state pair distribution. We assume that in a shear flow the higher order distributions can be expressed through the pair distribution in the same way as in an equilibrium state. To get explicit results we use a simple decoupling approximatio...

It is very important in the design of a drying system is to evaluate sticking behaviour of the materials goes under drying. A new approach to the sticking issue is applied in this study by carrying out a sticking test for the liquid associated with the materials under study. It was found that the liquid bridge is responsible of the initial sticking of the materials to the contact surface and th...