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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…
An original MEMS-based force sensing device is designed which allows to measure spatially resolved normal and tangential stress fields at the base of an elastomeric film. This device is used for the study of the contact stress between a…
Capillary forces guide the motion of biomolecular condensates, water-borne insects, and breakfast cereal. These surface-mediated interactions can be harnessed to build units into materials with exotic properties deriving from mesoscale…
In applications involving organic vapour, the performance of high surface area carbons is often challenged by water vapour in the atmosphere. Small angle neutron scattering (SANS), through its ability to distinguish between different…
Antiferromagnets (AFMs) are widely believed to be superior than ferromagnets in spintronics because of their high stability due to the vanishingly small stray field. It is thus expected that the order parameter of AFM should always align…
Contacts between particles in dense, sheared suspensions are believed to underpin much of their rheology. Roughness and adhesion are known to constrain the relative motion of particles, and thus globally affect the shear response, but an…
Adhesion requires molecular contact, and natural adhesives employ mechanical gradients to achieve complete (conformal) contact to maximize adhesion. Intuitively, one expects that the higher the modulus of the top layer, the lower will be…
We report the mechanically induced formation of a silicon-hydrogen covalent bond and its application in engineering nanoelectronic devices. We show that using the tip of a non-contact atomic force microscope (NC-AFM), a single hydrogen atom…
Few-shot segmentation (FSS) aims to rapidly learn novel class concepts from limited examples to segment specific targets in unseen images, and has been widely applied in areas such as medical diagnosis and industrial inspection. However,…
The (111) surface of CaF$_2$ has been intensively studied with large-amplitude frequency-modulation atomic force microscopy and atomic contrast formation is now well understood. It has been shown that the apparent contrast patterns obtained…
In [7], H. Bray, S. Brendle, and A. Neves studied rigidity properties of area-minimizing two-spheres in Riemannian three-manifolds with uniformly positive scalar curvature. In [13], these results were extended to marginally outer trapped…
We have used density functional theory to study the structural stability of surface alloys. Our systems consist of a single pseudomorphic layer of $M_xN_{1-x}$ on the Ru(0001) surface, where $M$ = Fe or Co, and $N$ = Pt, Au, Ag, Cd, or Pb.…
Remarkably, the interface of a fluid droplet will produce visible capillary waves when exposed to acoustic waves. For example, a small ($\sim\! 1 \mu$L) sessile droplet will oscillate at a low $\sim\!10^2$~Hz frequency when weakly driven by…
Micron-sized objects confined in thin liquid films interact through forces mediated by the deformed liquid-air interface. This capillary interactions provide a powerful driving mechanism for the self-assembly of ordered structures such as…
At the molecular scale there are strong attractive interactions between surfaces, yet few macroscopic surfaces are sticky. Extensive simulations of contact by adhesive surfaces with roughness on nanometer to micrometer scales are used to…
High-frequency atomic force microscopy has enabled extraordinary new science through large bandwidth, high speed measurements of atomic and molecular structures. However, traditional optical detection schemes restrict the dimensions, and…
The elastic deformation of a soft solid induced by capillary forces crucially relies on the excess stress inside the solid-liquid interface. While for a liquid-liquid interface this "surface stress" is strictly identical to the "surface…
Using a Monte Carlo method on a lattice model of a vicinal surface with short-range step-step attraction, we show that, at low temperature and near equilibrium, there is an inhibition of the motion of macro-steps. This inhibition leads to a…
The performance of tip-enhanced optical microscopy is often limited by inefficient coupling of the excitation field to the plasmonic tip apex, as well as by thermal drift and optical aberrations. Here, we demonstrate that adaptive wavefront…
A kinetically stabilized axially symmetric tandem mirror (KSTM) uses the momentum flux of low-energy, unconfined particles that sample only the outer end-regions of the mirror plugs, where large favorable field-line curvature exists. The…