Polymer-mediated melting in ultrasoft colloidal gels

Star polymers with a high number of arms, f = 263, become kinetically trapped when dispersed in an athermal solvent at concentrations above the overlapping one, forming physical gels. We show that the addition of linear chains at different concentrations and molecular weights reduces the modulus of the gel, eventually melting it. We explain this linear polymer-induced gel-liquid transition in terms of effective interactions and star depletion. In the limit of very high linear-chain molecular weight a "reentrant gelation" is detected and attributed to bridging flocculation, analogous to that observed in colloidal dispersions.