Structural rearrangements are an essential property of atomic and molecular glasses; they are critical in controlling resistance to flow and are central to the evolution of many properties of glasses, such as their heat capacity and dielectric constant. Despite their importance, these rearrangements cannot directly be visualized in atomic glasses. We used a colloidal glass to obtain direct three-dimensional images of thermally induced structural rearrangements in the presence of an applied shear. We identified localized irreversible shear transformation zones and determined their formation energy and topology. A transformation favored successive ones in its vicinity. Using continuum models, we elucidated the interplay between applied strain and thermal fluctuations that governs the formation of these zones in both colloidal and molecular glasses.

Shear bands, localized regions where shear flows concentrate, form in many complex fluids under a wide range of circumstances. In this review, we outline the main mechanisms that cause shear banding in complex fluids with granularity: foams, emulsions, colloidal suspensions, and granular matter. Apart from shear bands caused by continuum-scale mechanisms such as stress inhomogeneities and flow instabilities, we discuss a range of shear-banding phenomena for which the particle scale plays a crucial role.

Glasses behave as solids on experimental time scales due to their slow relaxation. Growing dynamic length scales due to cooperative motion of particles are believed to be central to this slow response. For quiescent glasses, however, the size of the cooperatively rearranging regions has never been observed to exceed a few particle diameters, and the observation of long-range correlations that are signatures of an elastic solid has remained elusive. Here, we provide direct experimental evidence of long-range correlations during the deformation of a dense colloidal glass. By imposing an external stress, we force structural rearrangements that make the glass flow, and we identify long-range correlations in the fluctuations of microscopic strain, and elucidate their scaling and spatial symmetry. The applied shear induces a transition from homogeneous to inhomogeneous flow at a critical shear rate, and we investigate the role of strain correlations in this transition.

We present a refractive-index-matched colloidal system that allows direct observation of critical Casimir induced aggregation with a confocal microscope. We show that in this system, in which van der Waals forces are negligible, a simple competition between repulsive screened Coulomb and attractive critical Casimir forces can account quantitatively for the reversible aggregation. Above the temperature T(a), the critical Casimir force drives aggregation of the particles into fractal clusters, while below T(a), the electrostatic repulsion between the particles breaks up the clusters, and the particles resuspend by thermal diffusion. The aggregation is observed in a remarkably wide temperature range of as much as 15 degrees. We derive a simple expression for the particle pair potential that accounts quantitatively for the temperature-dependent aggregation and aggregate breakup.