Abstract
In this Letter we show that in the rheology of electrostatically assembled soft materials, salt concentration plays a similar role as temperature for polymer melts, and as strain rate for soft solids. We rescale linear and nonlinear rheological data of a set of model electrostatic complexes at different salt concentrations to access a range of time scales that is otherwise inaccessible. This provides new insights into the relaxation mechanisms of electrostatic complexes, which we rationalize in terms of a microscopic mechanism underlying salt-enhanced activated processes.
- Received 15 June 2010
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.208301
This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.
© 2010 The American Physical Society