Condensed Matter Student Seminar: Anna Barth (Cohen Group)

Shear thickening, acoustic perturbations, and crossover scaling

Dense colloidal suspensions shear thicken — when they are sheared, their viscosity increases, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Acoustic perturbations dethicken dense suspensions, allowing external control over the suspension’s viscosity. In the first part of my talk, I will explain how shear thickening can be understood as a phenomenon governed by two critical points, the frictionless jamming point and the frictional jamming point. This understanding leads us to describe viscosity with a crossover scaling function. In the second part of my talk, I will show how this crossover scaling framework enables us to model the effect of acoustic perturbations on dense suspensions.