Metastability and Crystallization in Suspensions of Mixtures of Hard Spheres

Structural relaxation of metastable fluids and the kinetics of subsequent crystallization are measured by dynamic light scattering and by the growth of the main interlayer reflection in binary mixtures of colloidal polymer particles with hard-sphere-like interactions. The size ratios of the particles lie in the range for which eutectic phase behavior is expected. We find that at a constant volume fraction, close to the melting value of the one-component hard-sphere solid, the addition of up to about 10% by volume of the second component has negligible effect on the particle dynamics in the metastable fluid but significantly retards crystal nucleation and growth.