Kinetic arrest and glass-glass transition in short-ranged attractive colloids

A thermally reversible repulsive hard-sphere to sticky-sphere transition was studied in a model colloidal system over a wide volume fraction range. The static microstructure was obtained from high resolution small angle x-ray scattering, the colloid dynamics was probed by dynamic x-ray and light scattering, and supplementary mechanical properties were derived from bulk rheology. At low concentration, the system shows features of gas-liquid type phase separation. The bulk phase separation is presumably interrupted by a gelation transition at the intermediate volume fraction range. At high volume fractions, fluid-attractive glass and repulsive glass-attractive glass transitions are observed. It is shown that the volume fraction of the particles can be reliably deduced from the absolute scattered intensity. The static structure factor is modeled in terms of an attractive square-well potential, using the leading order series expansion of Percus-Yevick approximation. The ensemble-averaged intermediate scattering function shows different levels of frozen components in the attractive and repulsive glassy states. The observed static and dynamic behavior are consistent with the predictions of a mode-coupling theory and numerical simulations for a square-well attractive system.