Abstract
Concentrated colloidal suspensions and emulsions are amorphous soft solids, widespread in technological and industrial applications and studied as model systems in physics and materials sciences. They are easily fluidized by applying mechanical stress, undergoing a yielding transition that still lacks a unified description. Here we investigate yielding in three classes of repulsive soft solids and find that at the microscopic level, yielding consists of a transition between two distinct dynamical states. We rationalize this by proposing a lattice model with dynamical coupling between neighbouring sites, leading to a unified state diagram for yielding. Employing the analogy with van der Waals phase diagram for real gases, we show that distance from a critical point plays a major role in the emergence of first-order-like versus second-order-like features in yielding, thereby reconciling previously contrasting observations on the nature of the transition.
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Data availability
The data that support the plots within this paper are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.22674334. Additional data concerning this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Code availability
The code that supports the plots within this paper and other findings of this study is available via GitHub at https://github.com/steaime/SimulIsing.
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Acknowledgements
We thank E. D. Knowlton for help with the experiments on emulsions and L. Berthier for illuminating discussions. This work was funded by the French CNES, ANR (grant nos. ANR-14-CE32-0005 FAPRES (to L.C. and L.R.) and ANR-20-CE06-0028, MultiNet (to L.C. and L.R.)), and by the EU (Marie Skłodowska-Curie ITN Supolen grant 607937 (to S.A. and L.R.)). L.C. acknowledges support from the Institut Universitaire de France.
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S.A., L.R., D.J.P. and L.C. designed the experiments. S.A. performed the experiments and numerical simulations. S.A. and D.T. conceived the model. All authors analysed the results, discussed and improved the model and contributed to writing the paper.
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Aime, S., Truzzolillo, D., Pine, D.J. et al. A unified state diagram for the yielding transition of soft colloids. Nat. Phys. 19, 1673–1679 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02153-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-023-02153-w