Nanovesicles drive a tunable dynamical arrest of microparticles

Abstract

Vitrification in a dilute colloidal system needs an asymmetric particle composition (a mixture of nano and micro colloids) to materialize. The volume fraction of the large particles increases (up to ≈0.58) driven by depletion forces produced by the smaller colloids. Such entropic forces are short-ranged and attractive. We found a different type of dynamical arrest in an extremely dilute asymmetric mixture of nanovesicles and polystyrene microparticles, where energy, instead of entropy, is the main protagonist to drive the arrest. Furthermore, when the vesicles go through the gel-fluid phase transition, the mean square displacements of the microparticles suffer a sudden splitting indicating a viscous jump. If the vesicles are doped with negatively charged lipids, particles and vesicles repel each other and the rheology of the mixture becomes athermal and Newtonian. Our findings are important to understand caging phenomena in biological systems, where diverse electrostatic distributions are present.