Slippery diffusion-limited aggregation.

Colloidal particles that interact through strong, short-range, secondary attractions in liquids form irreversible "slippery" bonds that are not shear-rigid. Through event-driven simulations of slippery attractive spheres, we show that space-filling fractal clusters still emerge from the process of "slippery" diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA). Although slippery and classic DLA clusters have the same fractal dimension, d_{f}=2.5 , their average coordination numbers are quite different: z_{S}=6 whereas z_{C}=2 . Local tetrahedral attractive jamming of the particles leads to a structure factor, S(q) , that exhibits dense cluster peaks at higher wave numbers, q , and a fractal power-law rise toward lower q .