Related papers: Behavior of colloidal particles at an air/nematic …
Colloidal particles or nanoparticles, with equal affinity for two fluids, are known to adsorb irreversibly to the fluid-fluid interface. We present large-scale computer simulations of the demixing of a binary solvent containing such…
Colloidal particles with appropriate wetting properties can become very strongly trapped at an interface between two immiscible fluids. We have harnessed this phenomenon to create a new class of soft materials with intriguing and…
The geometric shape, symmetry, and topology of colloidal particles often allow for controlling colloidal phase behavior and physical properties of these soft matter systems. In liquid crystalline dispersions, colloidal particles with low…
Nematic liquid crystals at rough and fluctuating interfaces are analyzed within the Frank elastic theory and the Landau-de Gennes theory. We study specifically interfaces that locally favor planar anchoring. In the first part we reconsider…
We study the pair interaction of charged silica microrods in chiral nematic liquid crystals and show that the microrods with homeotropic surface anchoring form a bound state due to the competing effect of electrostatic (Coulomb) and elastic…
We exploit the long-ranged elastic fields inherent to confined nematic liquid crystals to assemble colloidal particles trapped at the liquid crystal interface into reconfigurable structures with complex symmetries and packings. Spherical…
We study elastic interactions between colloidal particles and deformation landscapes of undulations in a cholesteric liquid crystal under an electric field applied normal to cholesteric layers. The onset of undulation instability is…
The progress of realizing colloidal structures mimicking natural forms of organization in condensed matter is inherently limited by the availability of suitable colloidal building blocks. To enable new forms of crystalline and…
Previous experiments have shown that spherical colloidal particles relax to equilibrium slowly after they adsorb to a liquid-liquid interface, despite the large interfacial energy gradient driving the adsorption. The slow relaxation has…
The complex physics of self-assembly in colloidal crystals on deformable interfaces and surfaces poses interesting possibilities for the designability and synthesis of next-generation metamaterials. The goal of this article is to…
Ionic liquid crystals (ILCs) are anisotropic mesogenic molecules which additionally carry charges. This combination gives rise to a complex interplay of the underlying (anisotropic) contributions to the pair interactions. It promises…
Weakly attractive interactions between the tips of rod-like colloidal particles affect their liquid-crystal phase behaviour due to a subtle interplay between enthalpy and entropy. Here, we employ molecular dynamics simulations on…
We investigate dynamics and interactions of particles levitated and trapped by the thermophoretic force in a vacuum cell. Our analysis is based on footage taken by orthogonal cameras that are able to capture the three dimensional…
We study colloidal particles in a nematic-liquid-crystal-filled microfluidic channel and show how elastic interactions between the particle and the channel wall lead to different particle dynamics compared with conventional microfluidics.…
We apply the method developed in Ref. [S.B.Chernyshuk and B.I.Lev, Phys.Rev.E, \textbf{81}, 041701 (2010)] for theoretical investigation of colloidal elastic interactions between axially symmetric particles in the confined nematic liquid…
We study indented spherical colloids, interacting via depletion forces. These systems exhibit liquid-vapor phase transitions whose properties are determined by a combination of strong "lock-and-key" bonds and weaker non-specific…
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…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
The Landau-de Gennes free energy is used to study theoretically the interaction of parallel cylindrical colloidal particles trapped at a nematic-isotropic interface. We find that the effective interaction potential is non-monotonic. The…
The dynamics of active smectic liquid crystals confined on a spherical surface is explored through an active phase field crystal model. Starting from an initially randomly perturbed isotropic phase, several types of topological defects are…