Short range attractive colloids: Dynamics and energy landscape properties

We discuss the static and dynamical properties of a model of short range attractive colloidal systems. Our model is a binary mixture of particles interacting with a modified Lennard-Jones potential that we simulated by molecular dynamics. As previously found, we confirm the existence of a maximum in diffusivity on varying the temperature at constant high density. The possibility to characterize such a maximum by studying the properties of the potential energy landscape (PEL) is also discussed. This has been achieved by calculating the configurational entropy following two independent methods. It is shown that this quantity presents a maximum in correspondence with that of diffusivity. © IOP Publishing Ltd.