Viscoelasticity and Stokes-Einstein relation in repulsive and attractive colloidal glasses

TL;DR

This study uses numerical simulations to explore how viscosity and the Stokes-Einstein relation behave near different colloidal glass transitions, revealing a universal power-law divergence and a breakdown of the relation, especially in attractive glasses.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical analysis of viscoelastic properties and Stokes-Einstein relation breakdown in colloidal glasses, highlighting their independence from microscopic dynamics.

Findings

Viscosity diverges with a power-law near glass transitions.

Breakdown of the Stokes-Einstein relation is observed, especially in attractive glasses.

Results are consistent across different microscopic dynamics.

Abstract

We report a numerical investigation of the visco-elastic behavior in models for steric repulsive and short-range attractive colloidal suspensions, along different paths in the attraction-strength vs packing fraction plane. More specifically, we study the behavior of the viscosity (and its frequency dependence) on approaching the repulsive glass, the attractive glass and in the re-entrant region where viscosity shows a non monotonic behavior on increasing attraction strength. On approaching the glass lines, the increase of the viscosity is consistent with a power-law divergence with the same exponent and critical packing fraction previously obtained for the divergence of the density fluctuations. Based on mode-coupling calculations, we associate the increase of the viscosity with specific contributions from different length scales. We also show that the results are independent on the microscopic dynamics by comparing newtonian and brownian simulations for the same model. Finally we evaluate the Stokes-Einstein relation approaching both glass transitions, finding a clear breakdown which is particularly strong for the case of the attractive glass.