Related papers: Fast and rewritable colloidal assembly via field s…
Cells and microorganisms employ dynamic shape changes to enable steering and avoidance for efficient spatial exploration and collective organization. In contrast, active colloids, their synthetic counterparts, currently lack similar…
We demonstrate several examples of driving and steering of colloids when dispersed in nematic liquid crystals. The driving mechanism is based on the principle of nonlinear electrophoresis which is mediated by the asymmetry in the structure…
Colloidal particles can create reconfigurable nanomaterials, with applications such as color-changing, self-repairing, and self-regulating materials and reconfigurable drug delivery systems. However, top-down methods for manipulating…
A recently introduced active phase field crystal model describes the formation of ordered resting and traveling crystals in systems of self-propelled particles. Increasing the active drive, a resting crystal can be forced to perform…
We present a method of organizing incoherent motion of a colloidal suspension to produce synchronized, coherent motion. This method exploits general features of rotational response to time-dependent forcing, and it does not require…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
It is possible to produce a ponderomotive effect in a plasma system without time-varying fields, if the plasma flows over spatial oscillations in the field. This can be achieved by superimposing a spatially oscillatory perturbation on a…
We outline a basic strategy of how self-propulsion can be used to improve the yield of a typical colloidal self-assembly process. The success of this approach is predicated on the thoughtful design of the colloidal building block as well as…
We study the collective transport of paramagnetic colloids driven above a magnetic bubble lattice by an external rotating magnetic field. We measure a direct ratchet current which rises in integer and fractional steps with the field…
Endowing materials with physical intelligence holds the key for a progress leap in robotic systems. In spite of the growing success for macroscopic devices, transferring these concepts to the microscale presents several challenges connected…
Mixed-order phase transitions display a discontinuity in the order parameter like first-order transitions yet feature critical behavior like second-order transitions. Such transitions have been predicted for a broad range of equilibrium and…
We demonstrate a current-controlled, dynamic magnonic crystal. It consists of a ferrite film whose internal magnetic field exhibits a periodic, cosine-like variation. The field modulation is created by a direct current flowing through an…
We consider the unidirectional particle transport in a suspension of colloidal particles which interact with each other via a pair potential having a hard-core repulsion plus an attractive tail. The colloids are confined within a long…
We investigate analytically a microfluidic device consisting of a tube with non-uniform but spatially periodic diameter, where a fluid driven back and forth by a pump carries colloidal particles. Although the net flow of the fluid is zero,…
Colloidal particles can spontaneously self-assemble into ordered structures, which not only can manipulate the propagation of light, but also vibration or phonons. Using Monte Carlo simulation, we study the self-assembly of perfectly…
We examine colloidal particles driven over a periodic muffin tin substrate using numerical simulations. In the absence of a driving force this system exhibits a rich variety of commensurate and incommensurate static phases in which…
We explore possibility of tuning photonic crystal properties via order-disorder transition. We fabricated a photonic bandgap material consisting of a three-dimensional array of conducting magnetizable spheres. The spheres self-assemble into…
The transport behavior of a system of gravitationally driven colloidal particles is investigated. The particle interactions are determined by the superparamagnetic behavior of the particles. They can thus be arranged in a crystalline order…
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…
Colloidal inclusions in lab-on-a-chip devices can be used to perform analytic operations in a non-invasive fashion. We demonstrate here a novel approach to realize fast and reversible micro-sieving operations by manipulating and…