“Aging” of the structure of crystals of hard colloidal spheres

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Abstract
We study the development of the structure of crystals of colloidal hard spheres in time when gravity effects are minimal and polydispersity is small (<3%). The initial stacking of the close-packed hexagonal layers that make up the crystals is varied by applying various types of shear stress during nucleation of the crystals. The experimental powder diffraction patterns are consistent with a fraction of a faulted-twinned face-centered cubic (fcc) structure that grows at the expense of randomly stacked crystallites. If a faulted-twinned fcc structure is generated initially, no change is found over a considerable time. The present observations rule out the possibility that a randomly stacked structure is the equilibrium structure of colloidal crystals of (nearly) hard spheres, and point to the thermodynamic or kinetic stability of faulted-twinned fcc crystals in these systems.