Related papers: Driving dynamic colloidal assembly using eccentric…
While the dynamics of polymer chains in equilibrium media is well understood by now, the polymer dynamics in active non-equilibrium environments can be very different. Here we study the dynamics of polymers in a viscous medium containing…
The motion of an artificial micro-scale swimmer that uses a chemical reaction catalyzed on its own surface to achieve autonomous propulsion is fully characterized experimentally. It is shown that at short times, it has a substantial…
While colloids are promising building blocks for the self-assembly of materials with novel microstructures, their numerous tunable parameters inhibit brute force searching for appropriate parameter combinations that yield self-assembly of a…
Active colloidal particles provide versatile model systems for exploring non-equilibrium physics in motile matter. To date, most experimental realizations have focused on spherical particles, largely due to fabrication constraints. However,…
The addition of co-solutes to colloidal suspensions is often employed to induce tunable depletion interactions. In this work we investigate effective colloidal interactions arising from binary co-solute mixtures of hard spheres and patchy…
The surprising recent discoveries of quasicrystals and their approximants in soft matter systems poses the intriguing possibility that these structures can be realized in a broad range of nano- and micro-scale assemblies. It has been…
Gels in soft-matter systems are an important nonergodic state of matter. We study a colloid-polymer mixture which is quenched by increasing the polymer concentration, from a fluid to a gel. Using confocal microscopy, we study both the…
Colloids have a striking relevance in a wide spectrum of industrial formulations, spanning from personal care products to protective paints. Their behaviour can be easily influenced by extremely weak forces, which disturb their…
Self-assembly is traditionally described as the process through which an initially disordered system relaxes towards an equilibrium ordered phase only driven by local interactions between its building blocks. However, This definition is too…
In this paper we study aggregation kinetics in systems of particles functionalised by complementary linkers. Most of the coarse-grained models currently employed to study large-scale self-assembly of these systems rely on effective…
Active colloids belong to a class of non-equilibrium systems where energy uptake, conversion and dissipation occurs at the level of individual colloidal particles, which can lead to particles self-propelled motion and surprising collective…
Emergent behaviors occur in a vast array of systems across many scales, and are of fundamental physical importance because of the intrinsic difficulty in linking microscopic system properties to macroscopic behaviors. Here we study the…
Mutually repelling particles form spontaneously ordered clusters when forced into confinement. The clusters may adopt similar spatial arrangements even if the underlying particle interactions are contrastingly different. Here we demonstrate…
In recent years the functionality of synthetic active microparticles has edged even closer to that of their biological counterparts. However, we still lack the understanding needed to recreate at the microscale key features of autonomous…
We report computer simulation results on the cluster formation of dipolar colloidal particles driven by a rotating external field in a quasi-two-dimensional setup. We focus on the interplay between permanent dipolar and hydrodynamic…
Colloidal particles at complex fluid interfaces and within films assemble to form ordered structures with high degrees of symmetry via interactions that include capillarity, elasticity, and other fields like electrostatic charge. Here we…
Population heterogeneity is ubiquitous among active living systems, but little is known about its role in determining their spatial organization and large-scale dynamics. Combining evidence from synthetic active fluids assembled from…
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…
We study the depletion-induced self-assembly of indented colloids. Using state-of-the-art Monte Carlo simulation techniques that treat the depletant particles explicitly, we demonstrate that colloids assemble by a lock-and-key mechanism,…
The dynamical properties of classical fluids at pico-liter scale attract experimentally and theoretically much attention in the soft-matter and biophysics communities, due to the appearance of the microfluidics, also called 'lab-on-a-chip',…