Crystalline-to-glass transition in charge polydisperse colloids

Abstract

The crystalline-to-glass transition in dilute charge polydisperse colloidal suspensions is investigated using Monte Carlo simulations assuming pairwise additivity of the interaction. The time averaging of coordinates is used to reduce the broadening of the pair correlation function due to random thermal motion. The suspension is found to remain crystalline at low polydispersities and becomes disordered at large charge polydispersities (CPDs). The behaviour of particle diffusion in the suspension is used to characterize the disordered state as glass. The dependence of structural parameters such as Smax, gmin/gmax and particle diffusion suggests that the transition occurs at 26% CPD. The polydispersity of effective hard-sphere diameters is obtained and compared with that of a size polydisperse system.