Related papers: Waltzing route towards double-helix formation in c…

The phase behavior of colloidal particles embedded in a binary fluid is influenced by wetting layers surrounding each particle. The free energy of the fluid film depends on its morphology, i.e., on size, shape and connectivity. Under rather…

We investigate the influence of confinement on the positional order of a quasi-1D electron system trapped on the surface of liquid helium. We find evidence that the melting of the Wigner solid (WS) depends on the confinement strength, as…

Shells, when confined, can deform in a broad assortment of shapes and patterns, often quite dissimilar to what is produced by their flat counterparts (plates). In this work we discuss the morphological landscape of shells deposited on a…

The sticking of a soft polystyrene colloidal particle to a planar glass plate was studied by a microrheological technique using an optical tweezer to trap the particle and a piezoelectric-stage to position the plate and to sinusoidally…

Using a simple model of a frustrated helimagnet, the critical behavior is numerically investigated for planar or isotropic spins, and for cases of one or two chiral order parameters. The helical structure in this model arises from the…

Using laser tweezers and fluorescence confocal polarizing microscopy, we study colloidal interactions of solid microspheres in the nematic bulk caused by elastic distortions around the particles with strong tangential surface anchoring. The…

With computer simulations of the hard sphere model, we examine in detail the microscopic pathway connecting the metastable melt to the emergence of crystalline clusters. In particular we will show that the nucleation of the solid phase does…

We detail the application of bounding volume hierarchies to accelerate second-virial evaluations for arbitrary complex particles interacting through hard and soft finite-range potentials. This procedure, based on the construction of…

In chiral ferromagnets, weak spin-orbit interactions twist the ferromagnetic order into spirals, leading to helical order. We investigate an extended Ginzburg-Landau theory of such systems where the helical order is destabilized in favor of…

This article analyzes modulated phases in liquid crystals, from the long-established cholesteric and blue phases to the recently discovered twist-bend, splay-bend, and splay nematic phases, as well as the twist-grain-boundary (TGB) and…

Freestanding tubular crystals offer a general description of crystalline order on deformable surfaces with cylindrical topology, such as single-walled carbon nanotubes, microtubules, and recently reported colloidal assemblies. These systems…

Recently, continuum elasticity theory has been applied to explain the shape transition of icosahedral viral capsids - single-protein-thick crystalline shells - from spherical to buckled/faceted as their radius increases through a critical…

Herein, fundamentals of topology and symmetry breaking are used to understand crystallization and geometrical frustration in topologically close-packed structures. This frames solidification from a new perspective that is unique from…

The mechanical properties of crystalline materials can be substantially modified under confinement. Such modified macroscopic properties are usually governed by the altered microstructures and internal stress fields. Here, we use a parallel…

We show that nonlinear continuum elasticity can be effective in modeling plastic flows in crystals if it is viewed as Landau theory with an infinite number of equivalent energy wells whose configuration is dictated by the symmetry group…

Charged colloidal crystals exhibit a subtle interplay between electrostatic screening and elastic deformation. In an anisotropic elastic medium the coupling between dilation and the local ionic environment becomes direction dependent,…

Nuclei of ordered materials emerging from the isotropic state usually show a shape topologically equivalent to a sphere; the well-known examples are crystals and nematic liquid crystal droplets. In this work, we explore experimentally and…

The crystalline solids with lack of orientational ordering of anisotropic particles serve the purpose of studying the disordered systems with many fundamental applications in contemporary research. Despite the orientational disorder,…

We propose a hybrid lattice Boltzmann algorithm to simulate the hydrodynamics of colloidal particles inside a liquid crystalline host. To validate our algorithm, we study the static and the microrheology of a colloid in a nematic, with…

The presence of ordered structures such as helices in collapsed states of polymer chains is still an open question challenging physics and biology. In this work, we present a potential model for polymer chains with monomers that are not…