In recent years it has been realized in Soft Condensed Matter physics that the interaction between colloidal particles can be controlled and manipulated to give clusters leading to glass and gel formation and viscoelastic phase separation. Peter Schurtenberger has shown by a combination of scattering experiments and rheological measurements that these concepts developed in soft matter physics using model colloidal particles are also highly relevant for the understanding of the behaviour of practical systems ranging from protein solutions1 to clay suspensions2. This transfer of concepts from model systems to real systems was done by Peter Schurtenberger using highly quality experiments and great physical insight.
For this outstanding contribution Peter Schurtenberger was awarded the Rhodia Prize 2007.
1 Anna Stradner, Helen Sedgwick, Frederic Cardinaux, Wilson C. K. Poon, Stefan U. Egelhaaf & Peter Schurtenberger, Equilibrium cluster formation in concentrated protein solutions and colloids, Nature 432 (2004) 492
2 Andrey Shalkevich, Anna Stradner, Suresh Kumar Bhat, François Muller, and Peter Schurtenberger, Cluster, Glass, and Gel Formation and Viscoelastic Phase Separation in Aqueous Clay Suspensions, Langmuir 23 (2007) 3570