Intermittent dynamics and hyper-aging in dense colloidal gels

We investigate the slow dynamics of strongly aggregated particle gels by diffusing wave spectroscopy (DWS) using a charge coupled device (CCD) camera as a multispeckle detector. The evolution of the slow dynamics after the gel-point is followed using two different techniques, the multispeckle method and a novel correlation scheme, time resolved correlation (TRC), which allows us to obtain time resolved information on the dynamics of the gel. We find that the intensity autocorrelation function measured by multispeckle DWS exhibits an ultraslow relaxation, whose characteristic time strongly depends on the age of the gel. An analysis of the TRC data reveals that the slow dynamics is intermittent. We propose that the intermittency is due to rare disruptions or formations of bonds affecting the elastic backbone of the network, which lead to sudden long range rearrangements of the particle position and thus to a sudden change of the speckle pattern.