Critical-Like Gelation Dynamics in Cellulose Nanocrystal Suspensions.

We use time-resolved mechanical spectroscopy to offer a detailed picture of the gelation dynamics of cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) suspensions following shear cessation in the presence of salt. CNCs are charged, rodlike colloids that self-assemble into various phases, including physical gels serving as soft precursors for biosourced composites. Here, a series of linear viscoelastic spectra acquired across the sol-gel transition of CNC suspensions are rescaled onto two master curves that correspond to a viscoelastic liquid state prior to gelation and to a soft solid state after gelation. These two states are separated by a critical gel point, where all rescaling parameters diverge in an asymmetric fashion yet with exponents that obey hyperscaling relations consistent with previous works on isotropic colloids and polymer gels. Upon varying the salt content, we further show that these critical-like dynamics result in both time-connectivity and time-concentration superposition principles.

Word and bit line operation of a 1 × 1 µm2 superconducting vortex-based memory.

The lack of dense random access memory is one of the main bottlenecks for the creation of a digital superconducting computer. In this work we study experimentally vortex-based superconducting memory cells. Three main results are obtained. First, we test scalability and demonstrate that the cells can be straightforwardly miniaturized to submicron sizes. Second, we emphasize the importance of conscious geometrical engineering. In the studied devices we introduce an asymmetric easy track for vortex motion and show that it enables a controllable manipulation of vortex states. Finally, we perform a detailed analysis of word and bit line operation of a 1 × 1 µm2 cell. High-endurance, non-volatile operation at zero magnetic field is reported. Remarkably, we observe that the combined word and bit line threshold current is significantly reduced compared to the bare word-line operation. This could greatly improve the selectivity of individual cell addressing in a multi-cell RAM. The achieved one square micron area is an important milestone and a significant step forward towards creation of a dense cryogenic memory.

Slow dynamics and time-composition superposition in gels of cellulose nanocrystals.

Cellulose nanocrystals (CNCs) are rodlike biosourced colloidal particles used as key building blocks in a growing number of materials with innovative mechanical or optical properties. While CNCs form stable suspensions at low volume fractions in pure water, they aggregate in the presence of salt and form colloidal gels with time-dependent properties. Here, we study the impact of salt concentration on the slow aging dynamics of CNC gels following the cessation of a high-shear flow that fully fluidizes the sample. We show that the higher the salt content, the faster the recovery of elasticity upon flow cessation. Most remarkably, the elastic modulus G' obeys a time-composition superposition principle: the temporal evolution of G' can be rescaled onto a universal sigmoidal master curve spanning 13 orders of magnitude in time for a wide range of salt concentrations. Such a rescaling is obtained through a time-shift factor that follows a steep power-law decay with increasing salt concentration until it saturates at large salt content. These findings are robust to changes in the type of salt and the CNC content. We further show that both linear and nonlinear rheological properties of CNC gels of various compositions, including, e.g., the frequency-dependence of viscoelastic spectra and the yield strain, can be rescaled based on the sample age along the general master curve. Our results provide strong evidence for universality in the aging dynamics of CNC gels and call for microstructural investigations during recovery as well as theoretical modeling of time-composition superposition in rodlike colloids.