Related papers: Mesostructured composite materials with electrical…
Flexible mechanical metamaterials possess repeating structural motifs that imbue them with novel, exciting properties including programmability, anomalous elastic moduli and nonlinear and robust response. We address such structures via…
We present a numerical study on geometric percolation in liquid dispersions of hard slender colloidal particles subjected to an external orienting field. In the formulation and liquid-state processing of nanocomposite materials, the…
Mixed dimensional hybrid structures have recently gained increasing attention as promising building blocks for novel electronic and optoelectronic devices. In this context, hybridization of semiconductor nanowires with two-dimensional…
The tunable properties of molecular materials place them among the favorites for a variety of future generation devices. In addition, to maintain the current trend of miniaturization of those devices, a departure from the present top-down…
Nanoparticles of high refractive index materials can possess strong magnetic polarizabilities and give rise to artificial magnetism in the optical spectral range. While the response of individual dielectric or metal spherical particles can…
Surface plasmon resonances of metallic nanostructures offer great opportunities to guide and manipulate light on the nanoscale. In the design of novel plasmonic devices, a central topic is to clarify the intricate relationship between the…
We introduce structural heterogeneity, a new topological characteristic for semi-ordered materials that captures their degree of organisation at a mesoscopic level and tracks their time-evolution, ultimately detecting the order-disorder…
Nanophotonic technologies inherently rely on tailoring light-matter interactions through the excitation and interference of deeply confined optical resonances. However, existing concepts in optical mode engineering remain heuristic and are…
Mixing colloid shapes with distinctly different anisotropy generates composite nematics in which the order of the individual components can be fundamentally different. In colloidal rod-disk mixtures or hybrid nematics composed of…
Layered CoO$_2$ is of great interest for its promising properties but is meta-stable in its bulk form. CoO$_2$ was synthesized by converting the quasi-one-dimensional crystal structure of bulk Ca$_3$Co$_2$O$_6$ via a hydrothermal treatment.…
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…
Evaporative self-assembly offers a simple, cost-effective method for producing functional nanostructured materials. However, achieving tunable and ordered assemblies remains challenging, especially when working with complex building blocks…
Understanding nanoscale mechanisms responsible for the recently discovered ferroelectric nematics can be helped by direct visualization of self-assembly of strongly polar molecules. Here we report on scanning tunneling microscopy (STM)…
We deposit droplets of nanorods dispersed in solvents on substrate surfaces and let the solvent evaporate. We find that strong contact line pinning leads to dense nanorod deposition inside coffee stain fringes, where we observe large-scale…
Ferronematic phases, composed of liquid crystals doped with magnetic nanoparticles, exhibit unique magnetomechanical coupling effects that are of interest for responsive materials. In this study, we investigate the influence of…
Nanostructured materials have recently emerged as a promising approach for material appearance design. Research has mainly focused on creating structural colours by wave interference, leaving aside other important aspects that constitute…
Nonlinear nanophotonics is a rapidly developing field with many useful applications for a design of nonlinear nanoantennas, light sources, nanolasers, sensors, and ultrafast miniature metadevices. A tight confinement of the local…
Spatial confinement in nanoporous media affects the structure, thermodynamics and mobility of molecular soft matter often markedly. This article reviews thermodynamic equilibrium phenomena, such as physisorption, capillary condensation,…
Nanostructured dielectric metasurfaces offer unprecedented opportunities to control light-matter momentum exchange, and thereby the forces and torques that light can exert on matter. Here we introduce optical metasurfaces as components of…
Photonic metamaterials with properties unattainable in base materials are already beginning to revolutionize optical component design. However, their exceptional characteristics are often static, as artificially engineered into the material…