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Competing interactions stabilize exotic mesoscopic structures, yet the microscopic mechanisms by which they influence non-equilibrium processes leading to disordered states remain largely unexplored, despite their critical role in…
Designing and fabricating self-assembled open colloidal crystals have become one major direction in soft matter community because of many promising applications associated with open colloidal crystals. However, most of the self-assembled…
Using Monte Carlo (MC) computer simulations we explore the self-assembly and ordering behavior of a hybrid, soft magnetic system consisting of small magnetic nano-spheres in a liquid-crystalline (LC) matrix. Inspired by recent experiments…
Concentrated colloidal suspensions of nanorods often exhibit liquid-crystalline (LC) behavior. The transition to a nematic LC phase, with long-range orientational order of the particles, is usually well captured by Onsager's theory for hard…
Organic capping ligands can selectively bind to crystal facets to modulate growth kinetics and are important in chemical synthesis of inorganic nanocrystals. Using the capping ligands for shape-controlled growth of colloidal crystals is…
Studies of nanoparticle-based optical matter have only considered spherical constituents. Yet nanoparticles with other shapes are expected to have different local electromagnetic field distributions and therefore interactions with neighbors…
We demonstrate that the active thermocapillary stresses induced by multiple microbubbles offer simple routes to directed self-assembly and complex but controllable micromanipulation of mesoscopic colloidal particles embedded in a liquid.…
Weakly attractive interactions between the tips of rod-like colloidal particles affect their liquid-crystal phase behaviour due to a subtle interplay between enthalpy and entropy. Here, we employ molecular dynamics simulations on…
Interparticle interactions and bulk properties of colloidal suspensions can be substantially modified by addition of nanoparticles. Extreme asymmetries in size and charge between colloidal particles and nanoparticles present severe…
The study of liquid crystals at equilibrium has led to fundamental insights into the nature of ordered materials, as well as to practical applications such as display technologies. Active nematics are a fundamentally different class of…
We show that the combination of X-ray scattering with a nanofocused beam and X-ray cross correlation analysis is an efficient means for the full structural characterization of mesocrystalline nanoparticle assemblies with a single…
We report the equilibrium self-assembly of binary crystals of oppositely-charged colloidal microspheres at high density. By varying the magnitude of the charge on near equal-sized spheres we show that the structure of the binary crystal may…
The emergence of long-range spatiotemporal order from intrinsic chaos is a central challenge in far-from-equilibrium physics. In active fluids, such as cytoskeletal networks driving cellular motion, self-generated flows typically produce…
Achieving and exceeding the diversity of colloidal analogs of chemical elements and molecules as building blocks of matter has been the central goal and challenge of colloidal science ever since Einstein introduced the colloidal atom…
The phase behavior of the system of parallel rigid triblock copolymers is examined using the second-virial density functional theory. The triblock particle consists of two identical infinitely thin hard rods of finite lengths on the…
Inorganic nanocrystal gels retain distinct properties of individual nanocrystals while offering tunable, network structure-dependent characteristics. We review different mechanisms for assembling gels from colloidal nanocrystals including…
We show by means of continuum theory and simulations that geometric percolation in uniaxial nematics of hard slender particles is fundamentally different from that in isotropic dispersions. In the nematic, percolation depends only very…
Microscopy observations show that suspensions of synthetic and natural nano-layered smectite clay particles submitted to a strong external electric field undergo a fast and extended structuring. This structuring results from the interaction…
We study the dynamics of a driven spherical colloidal particle moving in a fluid with a broken rotational symmetry. Using a nematic liquid crystal as a model, we demonstrate that when the applied force is not aligned along or perpendicular…
In metal nanoparticles (NPs) supracrystals, the metallic core provides some key properties, e.g. magnetization, plasmonic response or conductivity, with the ligand molecules giving rise to others like solubility, assembly or interaction…