Crystallization And Reentrant Melting Of Charged Colloids In Nonpolar Solvents
2015
We explore the crystallization of charged colloidal particles in a nonpolar solvent mixture. We simultaneously charge the particles and add counterions to the solution with aerosol-OT (AOT) reverse micelles. At low AOT concentrations, the charged particles crystallize into body-centered-cubic (bcc) or face-centered-cubic (fcc) Wigner crystals; at high AOT concentrations, the increased screening drives a thus far unobserved reentrant melting transition. We observe an unexpected scaling of the data with particle size, and account for all behavior with a model that quantitatively predicts both the reentrant melting and the data collapse.
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