Related papers: Attractive interaction and bridging transition bet…
We study bridging transitions between spherically and cylindrically shaped particles (colloids) of radius $R$ separated by a distance $H$ that are dissolved in a bulk fluid (solvent). Using macroscopics, microscopic density functional…
Spatial confinement of a near-critical medium changes its fluctuation spectrum and modifies the corresponding order parameter distribution. These effects result in effective, so-called critical Casimir forces (CCFs) acting on the confining…
In biomimetic and biological systems, interactions between surfaces are often mediated by adhesive molecules, nanoparticles, or colloids dispersed in the surrounding solution. We present here a general, statistical-mechanical model for two…
Particles at liquid interfaces have the tendency to cluster due to capillary forces competing with gravitational buoyancy (i.e., normal to the distorted free surface). This is known as the Cheerios effect. Here we experimentally and…
A binary colloidal mixture of unequal sizes, subjected to an external potential barrier, has been investigated using canonical ensemble molecular dynamics simulations. The attractive depletion interaction between the external barrier and…
Hypothesis: The collective dynamics and self-assembly of colloids floating at a fluid/fluid interface is a balance between deterministic lateral interaction forces, viscous resistance to colloid motion along the surface and thermal…
We study the non-equilibrium coarsening dynamics of a binary liquid solvent around a colloidal particle in a presence of a time-dependent temperature gradient that emerges after temperature quench of a suitably coated colloid surface. The…
We study the thermodynamic behavior of nonpolar liquid mixtures in the vicinity of curved charged objects, such as electrodes or charged colloids. For small enough charge on the object, or equivalently, small potential, the…
Multivalent particles bind to targets via many independent ligand-receptor bonding interactions. This microscopic design spans length scales in both synthetic and biological systems. Classic examples include interactions between cells,…
We consider the interactions between two uncharged planar macroscopic surfaces immersed in an electrolyte solution which are induced by interfacial selectivity. These forces are taken into account by introducing a depletion free-energy…
A general class of nonadditive sticky-hard-sphere binary mixtures, where small and large spheres represent the solvent and the solute, respectively, is introduced. The solute-solute and solvent-solvent interactions are of hard-sphere type,…
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…
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…
In soft and condensed matter physics, effective interactions often emerge as a result of the spatial confinement of a fluctuating field. For instance, microscopic particles in a binary liquid mixture are subject to critical Casimir forces…
The critical Casimir effect provides a thermodynamic analogue of the well-known quantum mechanical Casimir effect. It acts between two surfaces immersed in a critical binary liquid mixture, and results from the confinement of concentration…
In our study we investigate the behaviour of the net force (NF) emerging between an ellipsoidal particle and a thick plate (slab), when the interaction takes place in a near critical fluid medium with account for the omnipresent van der…
Near-critical binary mixtures containing ions and confined between two charged and selective surfaces are studied within a Landau-Ginzburg theory extended to include electrostatic interactions. Charge density profiles and the effective…
We experimentally demonstrate that critical Casimir forces in colloidal systems can be continuously tuned by the choice of boundary conditions. The interaction potential of a colloidal particle in a mixture of water and 2,6-lutidine has…
In this thesis we study the lateral electrostatic interaction between a pair of non-identical, moderately charged colloidal particles trapped at an electrolyte interface in the limit of short inter-particle separations. Using a simplified…
How frictional effects emerge at the microscopic level in particulate materials remains a challenging question, particularly in systems subject to thermal fluctuations due to the transient nature of interparticle contacts. Here, we directly…