Related papers: Crystallization and gelation in colloidal systems …
We study the self-assembly of colloidal microgel particles at a quasi-two-dimensional air-water interface of a drying droplet. Using bright-field microscopy, we demonstrate that increasing particle elasticity drives interfacial organization…
Colloidal particles are often seen as big atoms that can be directly observed in real space. They are therefore playing an increasingly important role as model systems to study processes of interest in condensed matter physics such as…
Modulating liquid-to-solid transitions and the resulting crystalline structure for tailored properties is much desired. Colloidal systems are exemplary to this end, but the fundamental knowledge gaps in relating the influence of…
We explore the conditions under which colloids can be stabilized by the addition of smaller particles. The largest repulsive barriers between colloids occur when the added particles repel each other with soft interactions, leading to an…
Colloidal particles suspended in liquid crystals can exhibit various effective anisotropic interactions that can be tuned and utilized in self-assembly processes. We simulate a two-dimensional system of hard disks suspended in a solution of…
Colloidal gels are out of equilibrium soft solids composed of attractive Brownian particles that form a space-spanning network at low volume fractions. The elastic properties of these systems result from the network microstructure, which is…
Crystallization is a generic phenomenon in classical and quantum mechanics arising in a variety of physical systems. In this work we focus on a specific platform, ultracold dipolar bosons, which can be realized in experiments with dilute…
Dry active matter systems are well-known to exhibit Motility-Induced Phase Separation (MIPS). However, in wet active systems, attractive hydrodynamic interactions mediated by active particles stalled at a boundary can introduce…
Using laser tweezers and fluorescence confocal polarizing microscopy, we study colloidal interactions of solid microspheres in the nematic bulk caused by elastic distortions around the particles with strong tangential surface anchoring. The…
We report extensive numerical simulations of a simple model for charged colloidal particles in suspension with small non-adsorbing polymers. The chosen effective one-component interaction potential is composed of a short-range attractive…
Colloidal interactions in nematic liquid crystals can be described as interactions between elastic multipoles that depend on particle shape, topology, chirality, boundary conditions and induced topological defects. Here, we describe a…
Crystallization in a dense suspension of anisotropic spherical colloidal particles with a Yukawa potential is numerically investigated in a two-dimensional plane. It is found that a strong anisotropy can hinder the particles from…
Recent studies on confined crystals of charged colloidal particles are reviewed, both in equilibrium and out of equilibrium. We focus in particular on direct comparisons of experiments (light scattering and microscopy) with lattice sum…
We discuss the growth process of a crystalline phase out of a metastable over-compressed liquid that is brought into contact with a crystalline substrate. The process is modeled by means of molecular dynamics. The particles interact via the…
Using molecular dynamics computer simulations we investigate the structural and dynamical properties of a simple model for a colloidal gel at low volume fraction. We find that at low T the system is forming an open percolating cluster,…
We numerically study a simple model for thermo-reversible colloidal gelation in which particles can form reversible bonds with a predefined maximum number of neighbors. We focus on three and four maximally coordinated particles, since in…
We present an experimental study on the collective behavior of macroscopic self-propelled particles that are externally excited by light. This property allows testing the system response to the excitation intensity in a very versatile…
We consider a theoretical model for a binary mixture of colloidal particles and spherical emulsion droplets. The hard sphere colloids interact via additional short-ranged attraction and long-ranged repulsion. The droplet-colloid interaction…
We study the nucleation of nearly-hard charged colloidal particles. We use Monte Carlo simulations in combination with free-energy calculations to accurately predict the phase diagrams of these particles and map them via the freezing…
We present a detailed study of the kinetic cluster growth process during gelation of weakly attractive colloidal particles by means of experiments on critical Casimir attractive colloidal systems, simulations and analytical theory. In the…