Off-Equilibrium Surface Tension in Colloidal Suspensions

We study the fingering instability of the interface between two miscible fluids, a colloidal suspension and its own solvent. The temporal evolution of the interface in a Hele-Shaw cell is found to be governed by the competition between the nonlinear viscosity of the suspension and an off-equilibrium, effective surface tension Γₑ. By studying suspensions in a wide range of volume fractions, ΦC, we show that Γₑ~ΦC², in agreement with Korteweg's theory for miscible fluids. The surface tension exhibits an anomalous increase with particle size, which we account for using entropy arguments.