Related papers: Microfluidic self assembly
Active systems contain self-propelled particles and can spontaneously self-organize into patterns making them attractive candidates for the self-assembly of smart soft materials. One key limitation of our present understanding of these…
An extremely broad and important class of phenomena in nature involves the settling and aggregation of matter under gravitation in fluid systems. Some examples include: sedimenting marine snow particles in lakes and oceans (central to…
Significant progress has been made to increase access to droplet microfluidics for labs with limited microfluidics expertise or fabrication equipment. In particular, using off-the-shelf systems has been a valuable approach. However, the…
Colloidal self-assembly -- the spontaneous organization of colloids into ordered structures -- has been considered key to produce next-generation materials. However, the present-day staggering variety of colloidal building blocks and the…
The field of synthetic active matter has, thus far, been led by efforts to create point-like, isolated (yet interacting) self-propelled objects (\emph{e.g.} colloids, droplets, microrobots) and understanding their collective dynamics. The…
Electrostatic interactions play an important role in numerous self-assembly phenomena, including colloidal aggregation. Although colloids typically have a dielectric constant that differs from the surrounding solvent, the effective…
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…
The intricate interplay between colloidal particle shape and precisely engineered interaction potentials has paved the way for the discovery of unprecedented crystal structures in both two and three dimensions. Here, we make use of…
Droplet microfluidics, in which micro-droplets serve as individual reactors, has enabled a wide range of high-throughput biochemical processes. Unlike solid wells typically used in current biochemical assays, droplets are subject to…
The self-assembly of anisotropic building blocks into complex spatial architectures is an important design strategy in material science but the mechanisms by which the anisotropic interactions influence the early-stage growth and formation…
Active fluids comprise a variety of systems composed of elements immersed in a fluid environment which can convert some form of energy into directed motion; as such they are intrinsically out-of-equilibrium in the absence of any external…
Fluids with spatial density variations of single or mixed molecules play a key role in biophysics, soft matter and materials science. The fluid structures usually form via spinodal decomposition or nucleation following an instantaneous…
Under partial confinement, the motion of colloidal particles is restricted to a plane but their dynamics is influenced by hydrodynamic interactions mediated by the unconfined, three--dimensional flow of the embedding fluid. We demonstrate…
From microscopic fluid clusters to macroscopic droplets, the structure of fluids is governed by the Van der Waals force, a force that acts between polarizable objects. In this Letter, we derive a general theory that describes the…
The fluid phase diagram of trimer particles composed of one central attractive bead and two repulsive beads was determined as a function of simple geometric parameters using flat-histogram Monte Carlo methods. A variety of self-assembled…
If particles interact according to isotropic pair potentials that favor multiple length scales, in principle a large variety of different complex structures can be achieved by self-assembly. We present, motivate, and discuss a conjecture…
Many fascinating phenomena such as large-scale collective flows, enhanced fluid mixing and pattern formation have been observed in so-called active fluids, which are composed of particles that can absorb energy and dissipate it into the…
This paper presents an overview and discussion of magnetocapillary self-assemblies. New results are presented, in particular concerning the possible development of future applications. These self-organizing structures possess the notable…
Self-assembly is the autonomous organization of components into patterns or structures: an essential ingredient of biology and a desired route to complex organization. At equilibrium, the structure is encoded through specific interactions,…
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.…