Related papers: Optimising self-assembly through time-dependent in…
Particles with directional interactions are promising building blocks for new functional materials and may serve as models for biological structures. Mutually attractive nanoparticles that are deformable due to flexible surface groups, for…
The aggregation of attractive colloids has been extensively studied from both theoretical and experimental perspectives as the fraction of solid particles is changed, and the range, type and strength of attractive or repulsive forces…
Colloidal particles can self-assemble into various ordered structures in fluid flows that have potential applications in biomedicine, materials synthesis and encryption. These dynamic processes are also of fundamental interest for probing…
The promise of self-assembly to enable bottom-up formation of materials with prescribed architectures and functions has driven intensive efforts to uncover rational design principles for maximizing the yield of a target structure. Yet,…
Colloidal particles, amphiphiles, and functionalized nanoparticles are examples of systems that frequently exhibit short-range attractions coupled with long-range repulsions. In this work, we observe striking differences in the dynamics of…
Cluster growth in a coagulating system of active particles (such as microswimmers in a solvent) is studied by theory and simulation. In contrast to passive systems, the net velocity of a cluster can have various scalings dependent on the…
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…
We study the conditions under which and how an imposed cluster of fixed colloidal particles at prescribed positions triggers crystal nucleation from a metastable colloidal fluid. Dynamical density functional theory of freezing and Brownian…
Motivated by recent experiments on colloidal systems with competing attractive and repulsive interactions, we simulate a two-dimensional system of colloids with competing interactions that can undergo fragmentation. In the absence of any…
Bottom-up assembly of nanocrystals (NCs) into ordered arrays, or superlattices (SLs), is a promising route to design materials with new functionalities, but the degree of control over assembly into functional structures remains challenging.…
Colloids that interact via a short-range attraction serve as the primary building blocks for a broad range of self-assembled materials. However, one of the well-known drawbacks to this strategy is that these building blocks rapidly and…
Both biological and artificial self-assembly processes can take place by a range of different schemes, from the successive addition of identical building blocks, to hierarchical sequences of intermediates, all the way to the fully…
A simple three-dimensional model of a fluid whose constituent particles interact via a short range attractive and long range repulsive potential is used to model the aggregation into large spherical-like clusters made up of hundreds of…
The self-assembly of functionalized (patchy) particles with directional interactions into target structures is still a challenge, despite the significant experimental advances on their synthesis. The self-assembly pathways are typically…
We study the assembly into a gel network of colloidal particles, via effective interactions that yield local rigidity and make dilute network structures mechanically stable. The self-assembly process can be described by a Flory-Huggins…
Colloidal molecules are designed to mimic their molecular analogues through their anisotropic shape and interactions. However, current experimental realizations are missing the structural flexibility present in real molecules thereby…
The self-assembly of DNA-coated colloids controlled by enzymatic reactions has the potential to enable the formation of materials with hierarchical organization and switchable configurations. However, the problem of designing such…
The rapid progress in precisely designing the surface decoration of patchy colloidal particles offers a new, yet unexperienced freedom to create building entities for larger, more complex structures in soft matter systems. However, it is…
The field of complex self-assembly is moving toward the design of multi-particle structures consisting of thousands of distinct building blocks. To exploit the potential benefits of structures with such `addressable complexity,' we need to…
One of the challenges of self-assembling finite-sized colloidal aggregates with a sought morphology is the necessity of precisely sorting the position of the colloids at the microscopic scale to avoid the formation of off-target structures.…