Arrest and flow of colloidal glasses

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in understanding how colloidal glasses arrest and flow, highlighting the successes of mode coupling theory in predicting complex behaviors and discussing open questions about its effectiveness.

Contribution

It summarizes recent progress in applying mode coupling theory to colloidal glasses, including predictions of re-entrant arrest and flow properties from statistical mechanics.

Findings

MCT predicts re-entrant arrest behavior in colloids with short-range attractions.

Developments enable calculation of nonlinear flow parameters like yield stress.

MCT's effectiveness remains an open question.

Abstract

I review recent progress in understanding the arrest and flow behaviour of colloidal glasses, based on mode coupling theory (MCT) and related approaches. MCT has had notable recent successes in predicting the re-entrant arrest behaviour of colloids with short range attractions. Developments based upon it offer important steps towards calculating, from rational foundations in statistical mechanics, nonlinear flow parameters such as the yield stress of a colloidal glass. An important open question is why MCT works so well.