Related papers: Beyond icosahedral symmetry in packings of protein…
The results of a numerical investigation of fluidized beds of spherical particles in a narrow vertical cylindrical pipe, with particular attention to the spontaneous settling along the wall, are reported. Starting from a steady fluidized…
Dense polyhedron packings are useful models of a variety of condensed matter and biological systems and have intrigued scientists mathematicians for centuries. Recently, organizing principles for the types of structures associated with the…
The protein shells, or capsids, of all sphere-like viruses adopt icosahedral symmetry. In the present paper we propose a statistical thermodynamic model for viral self-assembly. We find that icosahedral symmetry is not expected for viral…
We present a model, based on symmetry and geometry, for proteins. Using elementary ideas from mathematics and physics, we derive the geometries of discrete helices and sheets. We postulate a compatible solvent-mediated emergent pairwise…
Self-assembly of granular particles is of great interest in both applied and basic research. It is commonly observed that when randomly packed into a container, granular particles form disordered structures like glass. As the particles are…
Densely-packed bundles of biological filaments (filamentous proteins) are common and critical structural elements in range of biological materials. While most bundles form from intrinsically straight filaments, there are notable examples of…
Creating materials with structure that is independently controllable at a range of scales requires breaking naturally occurring hierarchies. Breaking these hierarchies can be achieved via the decoupling of building block attributes from…
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…
The shape of biological shells, such as cell nuclei, membranes, and vesicles, often deviates from a perfect sphere due to an interplay of complex interactions with a myriad of molecular structures. In particular, semiflexible biopolymers…
We study the self-assembly behaviour of patchy particles with `protein-like' interactions that can be considered as a minimal model for the assembly of viral capsids and other shell-like protein complexes. We thoroughly explore the…
Quasicrystals whose building blocks are of mesoscopic rather than atomic scale have recently been discovered in several soft-matter systems. Contrary to metallurgic quasicrystals whose source of stability remains a question of great debate…
Using X-ray tomography, we experimentally investigate the structural evolution of packings composed of 3D-printed hexapod particles, each formed by three mutually orthogonal spherocylinders, during tap-induced compaction. We identify two…
We explore the use of templated self-assembly to facilitate the formation of complex target structures made from patchy particles. First, we consider the templating of high-symmetry shell structures around a spherical core particle. We find…
Quasicrystals are fascinating structures, characterized by strong positional order but lacking the periodicity of a crystal. In colloidal systems, quasicrystals are typically predicted for particles with complex or highly specific…
From understanding the sand on the beach to the foam on your beer, soft sphere simulations have been crucial to the study of the amorphous world around us. However, many of the materials we interact with on a daily basis aren't comprised of…
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…
At sufficiently low temperatures and high densities, repulsive spherical particles in two-dimensions (2d) form close-packed structures with six-fold symmetry. By contrast, when the interparticle interaction has an attractive anisotropic…
Multi-component aggregates are being intensively researched in various fields because of their highly tunable properties and wide applications. Due to the complex configurational space of these systems, research would greatly benefit from a…
At low temperatures, colloidal particles with short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions can form various periodic microphases in bulk.In this paper, we investigate the self-assembly behaviour of colloids with competing…
Controlling the self-assembly of supramolecular structures is vital for living cells, and a central challenge for engineering at the nano- and microscales. Nevertheless, even particles without optimized shapes can robustly form well-defined…