Related papers: Microscale adhesion patterns for the precise local…
Adhesion between two surfaces depend on the chemical and the mechanical properties of both the materials. However, heterogeneities (surface or bulk) affect the adhesion between the two surfaces tremendously. In this work, we study the role…
Cholesteric liquid crystals can exhibit spatial patterns in molecular alignment at interfaces that can be exploited for particle assembly. These patterns emerge from the competition between bulk and surface energies, tunable with the system…
Interfaces between a water droplet and a network of pillars produce eventually superhydrophobic, self-cleaning properties. Considering the surface fraction of the surface in interaction with water, it is possible to tune precisely the…
Chemotaxis is a ubiquitous biological phenomenon in which cells detect a spatial gradient of chemoattractant, and then move towards the source. Here we present a position-dependent advection-diffusion model that quantitatively describes the…
Microbullet particles, cylinders with one blunt and one spherical end, offer a novel platform to study the effects of anisotropy and curvature on colloidal assembly in complex fluids. Here, we disperse microbullets in…
Silicone is frequently used as a model system to investigate and tune wetting on soft materials. Silicone is biocompatible and shows excellent thermal, chemical, and UV stability. Moreover, the mechanical properties of the surface can be…
Organic surface ligands are integral components of nanocrystals and nanoparticles that have a strong influence on their physicochemical properties, their interaction with the environment, and their ability to self-assemble and order into…
Controlling the motion of non-Newtonian drops on surfaces is crucial for applications ranging from inkjet printing to biomedical devices and food processing. While the macroscopic behavior of viscoelastic drops sliding on tilted hydrophobic…
Starting from a microscopic lattice model, we investigate clustering, micellization and micelle ordering in semi-dilute solutions of AB diblock copolymers in a selective solvent. To bridge the gap in length scales, from monomers to ordered…
Adhesion control at the interface of two surfaces is crucial in various applications, including the design of micro- and nanodevices such as microfluidic devices, triboelectric nanogenerators, biochips, and electronic sensors. Several…
Biological interactions with material surfaces span a wide range of length scales, yet conventional surface measurements often fail to account for scale, limiting the insights they provide for surface engineering. Here, we investigate how…
Adhesion of bacteria to liquid-liquid interfaces can play a role in the biodegradation of dispersed hydrocarbons and in biochemical and bioprocess engineering. Whereas thermodynamic factors underpinning adhesion are well studied, the role…
Heteroepitaxial structures based on Bi$_{2}$Te$_{3}$-type topological insulators (TIs) exhibit exotic quantum phenomena. For optimal characterization of these phenomena, it is desirable to control the interface structure during film growth…
Optical binding allows creation of mechanically stable nanoparticle configurations owing to formation of self-consistent optical trapping potentials. While the classical diffraction limit prevents achieving deeply subwavelength…
Molecular building blocks interacting at the nanoscale organize spontaneously into stable mono- layers that display intriguing long-range ordering motifs on the surface of atomic substrates. The patterning process, if appropriately…
Identifying and removing microplastics (MPs) from the environment is a global challenge. This study explores how the colloidal fraction of common MPs behave at aqueous interfaces of liquid crystal (LC) films. We observed polyethylene (PE)…
Superhydrophobic surfaces with multi-scale topographies offer exceptionally high apparent water contact angles and low contact angle hysteresis by virtue of the small liquid{\textendash}solid contact fractions they enable. Natural…
Bottom-up assembly of two-dimensional (2D) materials into macroscale morphologies with emergent properties requires control of the material surroundings, so that energetically favorable conditions direct the assembly process. MXenes, a…
We demonstrate how broadband angular selectivity can be achieved with stacks of one-dimensionally periodic photonic crystals, each consisting of alternating isotropic layers and effective anisotropic layers, where each effective anisotropic…
Macromolecules can form regular structures on inert surfaces. We have developed a combined empirical and modeling approach to derive the bonding. From experimental scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) images of structures formed on Au(111)…