Shear experiments

We perform shear experiments on the colloidal suspensions at very low shear rates of the order of 10^-5 s^-1. At these low shear rates, particle diffusion due to the Brownian motion of the particles is still important. The set of figures below show the expansion of a stacking fault due to the motion of the dislocation located at the blue arrow. The upper row of images shows a three-dimensional reconstruction of particles at the stacking fault, and the lower row shows confocal microscope images of a two-dimensional section through the crystal, taken during the shear experiment.