Charged Colloids As Model Systems for Metals: Short-range Order Phenomena and Nucleation Behavior

Due to their mesoscopic length scales, colloidal suspensions are ideal model systems to address fundamental issues in condensed matter physics such as liquid ordering, nucleation and crystallization. Colloidal particles are several orders of magnitude larger than atoms in metals and their relaxation behavior is very sluggish compared to atomic systems. Due to the possibility of tunable interaction, systematic investigations of nucleation and the short-range order in a charged colloidal silica system far from equilibrium state are discussed in the present work. The results of these investigations are compared to measurements of metallic systems.