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Updated: May 23, 2026

Confocal Imaging of Confined Quiescent and Flowing Colloid-polymer Mixtures
Published on: May 20, 2014
Connectedness percolation of elongated hard particles in an external field
Ronald H J Otten1, Paul van der Schoot
1Theory of Polymers and Soft Matter and Eindhoven Polymer Laboratories, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. r.h.j.otten@gmail.com
Abstract:
A theory is presented of how orienting fields and steric interactions conspire against the formation of a percolating network of, in some sense, connected elongated colloidal particles in fluid dispersions. We find that the network that forms above a critical loading breaks up again at higher loadings due to interaction-induced enhancement of the particle alignment. Upon approach of the percolation threshold, the cluster dimensions diverge with the same critical exponent parallel and perpendicular to the field direction, implying that connectedness percolation is not in the universality class of directed percolation.
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