Résumé
Concentrated colloidal suspensions are a well‐tested model system which has a glass transition. Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behaviour when the particle concentration is high; the particles are roughly analogous to individual molecules in a traditional glass. Because the particle size can be large (100 nm–1000 nm), these samples can be studied with a variety of optical techniques including microscopy and dynamic light scattering. Here the chapter reviews the phenomena associated with the colloidal glass transition, and in particular discuss observations of spatial and temporally heterogeneous dynamics within colloidal samples near the glass transition. Although this chapter focuses primarily on results from hard‐sphere‐like colloidal particles, it also discusses other colloidal systems with attractive or soft repulsive interactions