Related papers: Colloidal Particles at Chiral Liquid Crystal Inter…
Monopole-like electrostatic interactions are ubiquitous in biology and condensed matter, but they are often screened by counter-ions and cannot be switched from attractive to repulsive. In colloidal science, where the prime goal is to…
We report a computer simulation study on the effect of molecular structural biaxiality in the phase formation of chiral molecules. In this study, we have done coarse-grained modeling to observe self-assembled phase behavior. In our…
One of the central experimental efforts in nematic colloids research aims to explore how the interplay between the geometry of particles along with the accompanying nematic director deformations and defects around them can provide a means…
We study the interface between a solid trapped within a bath of liquid by a suitably shaped non-uniform external potential. Such a potential may be constructed using lasers, external electric or magnetic fields or a surface template. We…
We analyze the effective potential for nanoparticles trapped at a fluid interface within a simple model which incorporates surface and line tensions as well as a thermal average over interface fluctuations (capillary waves). For a single…
The fabrication of novel soft materials is an important scientific and technological challenge. We investigate the response of magnetic ellipsoidal particles adsorbed at fluid-fluid interfaces to external magnetic fields. By exploiting…
Colloidal particles dispersed in a partially ordered medium, such as a liquid crystal (LC) phase, disturb its alignment and are subject to elastic forces. These forces are long-ranged, anisotropic and tunable through temperature or external…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
The kinetics of phase transition processes often governs the resulting material microstruc-ture. Using optical microscopy, we here investigate the formation and stabilization of a po-rous crystalline microstructure forming in low-salt…
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…
When colloidal particles form a crystal phase on a spherical template, their packing is governed by the effective interaction between them and the elastic strain of bending the growing crystal. For example, if growth commences under…
We calculate the ion and composition distributions around colloid particles in an aqueous mixture, accounting for preferential adsorption, electrostatic interaction, selective solvation among ions and polar molecules, and…
Anisotropic fluids appear in a diverse array of systems, from liquid-crystal displays to bacterial swarms, and are characterized by orientational order. Large colloidal particles immersed in such environments disturb the medium's…
We study a two-dimensional fluid of particles interacting through a spherically-symmetric and marginally soft two-body repulsion. This model can exist in three different crystal phases, one of them with square symmetry and the other two…
The crystal-melt interfaces of a binary hard-sphere fluid mixture in coexistence with a single-component hard-sphere crystal is investigated using molecular-dynamics simulation. In the system under study, the fluid phase consists of a…
We study colloidal particle dynamics of a model glass system using confocal and fluorescence microscopy as the sample evolves from a hard-sphere glass to a liquid with attractive interparticle interactions. The transition from hard-sphere…
We investigate bridging and aggregation of two colloidal particles in a near-critical binary mixture when the fluid far from the particles is outside the coexistence (CX) curve and is rich in the component disfavored by the colloid…
Lipid rafts are hypothesized to facilitate protein interaction, tension regulation, and trafficking in biological membranes, but the mechanisms responsible for their formation and maintenance are not clear. Insights into many other…
We performed dynamic simulations of spheres with short-range attractive interactions for many values of interaction strength and range. Fast crystallization occurs in a localized region of this parameter space, but the character 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…