Hard-sphere-like dynamics in highly concentrated alpha-crystallin suspensions

P Vodnala and N Karunaratne and L Lurio and GM Thurston and M Vega and E Gaillard and S Narayanan and A Sandy and QT Zhang and EM Dufresne and G Foffi and P Grybos and P Kmon and P Maj and R Szczygiel, PHYSICAL REVIEW E, 97, 020601 (2018).

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.97.020601

The dynamics of concentrated suspensions of the eye-lens protein alpha crystallin have been measured using x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy. Measurements were made at wave vectors corresponding to the first peak in the hard-sphere structure factor and volume fractions close to the critical volume fraction for the glass transition. Langevin dynamics simulations were also performed in parallel to the experiments. The intermediate scattering function f (q, tau) could be fit using a stretched exponential decay for both experiments and numerical simulations. The measured relaxation times show good agreement with simulations for polydisperse hard-sphere colloids.

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