Citation:
Kanai, T. ; Boon, N. ; Lu, P. J. ; Sloutskin, E. ; Schofield, A. B. ; Smallenburg, F. ; van Roij, R. ; Dijkstra, M. ; Weitz, D. A. Crystallization and reentrant melting of charged colloids in nonpolar solvents. Phys. Rev. E 2015, 91, 030301. Copy at http://www.tinyurl.com/y4hlrbaf
 | 2015_pre_kanai.pdf | 1008 KB |
Date Published:
MarAbstract:
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.