Shear Thickening in Concentrated Soft Sphere Colloidal Suspensions: A Shear Induced Phase Transition

Figure 2

Displayed are two interaction potentials of electrically stabilized colloidal particles as a function of the surface-to-surface distance . The combination of electrostatic repulsion and van der Waals attraction leads to the occurrence of a primary and a secondary potential minimum, while indicates the potential maximum and the average mutual distance of the particles. For highly stabilized particles (effective hard spheres), the secondary minimum disappears.