Irreversible Rearrangements, Correlated Domains, and Local Structure in Aging Glasses

Bidisperse colloidal suspensions of temperature-sensitive microgel spheres were quenched from liquid to glass states by a rapid temperature drop, and then the glass was permitted to age. Irreversible rearrangements, events that dramatically change a particle’s local environment, were observed to be closely related to dynamic heterogeneity. The rate of these irreversible events decreased during aging and the the number of particles required to move as part of these irreversible rearrangements increased. Thus, the slowing dynamics of aging were governed by growing, correlated domains of particles. Additionally, short-range order developed, and a spatial decay length scale associated with orientational order was found to grow during aging

Correlations between short- and long-time relaxation in colloidal supercooled liquids and glasses

Spatiotemporal dynamics of short- and long-time structural relaxation are measured experimentally as a function of packing fraction, φ, in quasi-two-dimensional colloidal supercooled liquids and glasses. The relaxation times associated with long-time dynamic heterogeneity and short-time intracage motion are found to be strongly correlated and to grow by orders of magnitude with increasing φ toward dynamic arrest. We find that clusters of fast particles on the two timescales often overlap, and, interestingly, the distribution of minimum-spatial-separation between closest nonoverlapping clusters across the two timescales is revealed to be exponential with a decay length that increases with φ. In total, the experimental observations suggest short-time relaxation events are very often precursors to heterogeneous relaxation at longer timescales in glassy materials

Automated classification of single airborne particles from two-dimensional angle-resolved optical scattering (TAOS) patterns by non-linear filtering

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Vibrational and structural signatures of the crossover between dense glassy and sparse gel-like attractive colloidal packings

We investigate the vibrational modes of quasi-two-dimensional disordered colloidal packings of hard colloidal spheres with short-range attractions as a function of packing fraction. Certain properties of the vibrational density of states (vDOS) are shown to correlate with the density and structure of the samples (i.e., in sparsely versus densely packed samples). Specifically, a crossover from dense glassy to sparse gel-like states is suggested by an excess of phonon modes at low frequency and by a variation in the slope of the vDOS with frequency at low frequency. This change in phonon mode distribution is demonstrated to arise largely from localized vibrations that involve individual and/or small clusters of particles with few local bonds. Conventional order parameters and void statistics did not exhibit obvious gel-glass signatures as a function of volume fraction. These mode behaviors and accompanying structural insights offer a potentially new set of indicators for identification of glass-gel transitions and for assignment of gel-like versus glass-like character to a disordered solid material

Optical artifacts in digital video microscopy

The limits of digital video microscopy due to optical artifacts are explored. In particular, the contribution of out-of-focus layers in a bulk crystal to the optical image of an in-focus monolayer was investigated. © 2006 OSA

Classification of Aggregates Using Multispectral Two-Dimensional Angular Light Scattering Simulations

Airborne particulate matter plays an important role in climate change and health impacts, and is generally irregularly shaped and/or forms agglomerates. These particles may be characterized through their light scattering signals. Two-dimensional angular scattering from such particles produce a speckle pattern that is influenced by their morphology (shape and material composition). In what follows, we revisit morphological descriptors obtained from computationally generated light scattering patterns from aggregates of spherical particles. These descriptors are used as inputs to a multivariate statistical algorithm and then classified via supervised machine learning algorithms. The classification results show improved accuracy over previous efforts and demonstrate the utility of the proposed morphological descriptors

Review of elastic light scattering from single aerosol particles and application in bioaerosol detection

Elastic light scattering (ELS) from single micron-sized particles has been used as a fast, non-destructive diagnostic tool in life science, physics, chemistry, climatology, and astrophysics. Due to the large scattering cross-section, ELS can be used to find trace amounts of suspect particles such as bioaerosols among complex, diverse atmospheric aerosols, based on single-particle interrogation. In this article, we briefly summarized the main computational models and instrumentation developed for ELS, then reviewed how properties like particle size, refractive index, degree of symmetry, and surface roughness, in addition to packing density, shape of primary particles in an aggregate, and special helix structures in compositions can be determined from ELS measurements. Meanwhile, we emphasize on how these parameters obtained from ELS measurements can be used for bioaerosol detection, characterization, and discrimination from atmospheric aerosol particles using different classification algorithms