Related papers: Chiral Self-Assembly of Helical Particles
Colloidal particles in polymer solutions and functionalized nanoparticles often exhibit short-range attraction coupled with long-range repulsion (SALR) leading to the spontaneous formation of symmetric patterns. Chiral nanostructures formed…
We present a combined experimental and theoretical study on the role of copolymer architecture in the self-assembly of binary PEO-PCL mixtures in water-THF, and show that altering the chain geometry and composition of the copolymers can…
Motivated by recent experimental findings in chemical synthesis of colloidal particles, we draw an analogy between self-assembly processes occurring in biological systems (e.g. protein folding) and a new exciting possibility in the field of…
The formation of quasi-spherical cages from protein building blocks is a remarkable self-assembly process in many natural systems, where a small number of elementary building blocks are assembled to build a highly symmetric icosahedral…
We systematically study phase transformations from one helical structure to another. Motivated in part by recent work that relates the presence of compatible interfaces with properties such as the hysteresis and reversibility of a phase…
Polymeric particles are strong candidates for designing artificial materials capable of emulating the complex twisting-based functionality observed in biological systems. In this letter, we provide the first detailed investigation of the…
Using Langevin simulations, we find that simple 'generic' bead-and-spring homopolymer chains in a sufficiently bad solvent spontaneously develop helical order during the process of collapsing from an initially stretched conformation. The…
Stiff, elongated biomolecules such as filamentous viruses, DNA or cellulose nanocrystals are known to form liquid crystals often exhibiting a helical supramolecular organization. Little is known about the microscopic origin, size and…
In many biological materials with a hierarchical structure there is an intriguing and unique mechanism responsible for the 'propagation' of order from the molecular to the nano- or micro-scale level. Here we present a much simpler molecular…
Non-equilibrium transport of particles embedded in a liquid crystal host can, by cooling through a phase transition, be exploited to create a remarkable variety of structures including shells, foams, and gels. Due to the complexity of the…
In this work we use Monte Carlo simulations to study the phase behavior of spherical caps confined between two parallel hard walls separated by a distance H. The particle model consists of a hard sphere of diameter \sigma cut off by a plane…
Filamentous bacteriophages such as fd-like viruses are monodisperse rod-like colloids that have well defined properties: diameter, length, rigidity, charge and chirality. Engineering those viruses leads to a library of colloidal rods which…
Patchy colloids are promising candidates for building blocks in directed self-assembly. To be successful the surface patterns need to both be simple enough to be synthesized, while feature-rich enough to cause the colloids to self-assemble…
I propose, as geometric structure in an internal space, a helical field that is responsible for intrinsic properties of point particles, particularly, electron. For the novel theoretical development, plasma astrophysical analogy is made…
The helix is a ubiquitous motif for biopolymers. We propose a heuristic, entropically based model that predicts helix formation in a system of hard spheres and semiflexible tubes. We find that the entropy of the spheres is maximized when…
Chirality is ubiquitous in nature across all length scales, with major implications spanning the fields of biology, chemistry and physics to materials science. How chirality propagates from nanoscale building blocks to meso- and macroscopic…
Using self-consistent field and density-functional theories, we first investigate colloidal self-assembling of colloid/polymer films confined between two soft surfaces grafted by polymers. With the increase of colloidal concentrations, the…
A significant effort in condensed matter physics is dedicated to the search for exotic arrangements of electric dipoles in crystals. Non-collinear dipolar arrangements mimicking magnetic spin textures, such as polar vortices and skyrmions,…
In contrast to most self-assembling synthetic materials, which undergo unbounded growth, many biological self-assembly processes are self-limited. That is, the assembled structures have one or more finite dimensions that are much larger…
Quasicrystals are unique materials characterized by long-range order without periodicity. They are observed in systems such as metallic alloys, soft matter, and particle simulations. Unlike periodic crystals, which are invariant under…