Emanuela Zaccarelli

TL;DR: Experiments are reported showing that gelation of spherical particles with isotropic, short-range attractions is initiated by spinodal decomposition; this thermodynamic instability triggers the formation of density fluctuations, leading to spanning clusters that dynamically arrest to create a gel.

TL;DR: In this article, a classification of different colloidal gels based on colloid colloid interactions is presented, and the authors discriminate primarily between non-equilibrium and equilibrium routes to gelation, the former being slaved to thermodynamic phase separation while the latter is individuated in the framework of competing interactions and of patchy colloids.

TL;DR: Theoretical results suggest that the reduction of the number of bonded nearest neighbors offers the possibility of generating liquid states with temperature T lower than the liquid-gas critical temperature with a vanishing occupied packing fraction (phi), a case which can not be realized with spherically interacting particles.

TL;DR: A model in which particles interact with short-ranged attractive and long-ranged repulsive interactions is studied, in an attempt to model the equilibrium cluster phase recently discovered in sterically stabilized colloidal systems in the presence of depletion interactions.

TL;DR: In this paper, the phase diagram of Laponite suspensions is discussed, with the aim of clarifying several issues that have caused a long-time controversy on the system, if aging and sample preparation are correctly taken into account.