Experimental studies of contact networks in jammed colloidal systems

Recent theoretical advances in the statistical mechanics of jamming have provided a new outlook for thermodynamically characterizing packings of granular matter. Packing density, spatial ordering metrics, and the number of inter-particle contacts are a few fundamental parameters used in various theoretical models. However, experimental measurements of inter-particle forces have been illusive. Here, fluorescent molecular probes are used to identify inter-particle contacts in high resolution confocal images of jammed colloidal systems.