Connectedness Percolation of Elongated Hard Particles in an External Field

A theory is presented of how orienting fields and steric interactions conspire against the formation of a percolating network of, in some sense, connected elongated colloidal particles in fluid dispersions. We find that the network that forms above a critical loading breaks up again at higher loadings due to interaction-induced enhancement of the particle alignment. Upon approach of the percolation threshold, the cluster dimensions diverge with the same critical exponent parallel and perpendicular to the field direction, implying that connectedness percolation is not in the universality class of directed percolation.