Long-Lived Glassy States in Dense Nearly Hard Sphere Colloids

Abstract

By means of Brownian dynamics simulation methods for a Yukawa-potential system and for a hard-sphere system, we investigated systematically the induction time after a rapid compression until crystallization takes place in nearly hard-sphere colloidal systems. Although long-lived disordered states have been experimentally found for an effectively one-component colloidal system, we found that such a state cannot be realized by simulations using a purely one-component system with a spherically-symmetric simple interparticle interaction potential