Related papers: Capillary Assembly of Colloids: Interactions on Pl…
A particle placed in soft matter distorts its host and creates an energy landscape. This can occur, for example, for particles in liquid crystals, for particles on lipid bilayers or for particles trapped at fluid interfaces. Such energies…
Directed assembly of colloids is an exciting field in materials science to form structures with new symmetries and responses. Fluid interfaces have been widely exploited to make densely packed ordered structures. We have been studying how…
Capillarity-driven self-assembly at fluidic interfaces offers a scalable route to large, reconfigurable materials. Microscale particles with high horizontal-to-vertical aspect ratios become attractive building blocks for shape-directed…
Within a general framework we study the effective, deformation-induced interaction between two colloids trapped at a fluid interface. As an application, we consider the interface deformation owing to the electrostatic field of charged…
Capillary interactions can be used to direct assembly of particles adsorbed at fluid-fluid interfaces. Precisely controlling the magnitude and direction of capillary interactions to assemble particles into favoured structures for materials…
Within a general theoretical framework we study the effective, deformation-induced interaction between two colloidal particles trapped at a fluid interface in the regime of small deformations. In many studies, this interaction has been…
Capillary interactions have emerged as a tool for the directed assembly of particles adsorbed at fluid-fluid interfaces, and play a role in controlling the mechanical properties of emulsions and foams. In this paper, following Davies et al.…
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…
Capillary forces guide the motion of biomolecular condensates, water-borne insects, and breakfast cereal. These surface-mediated interactions can be harnessed to build units into materials with exotic properties deriving from mesoscale…
The fabrication of novel soft materials is an important scientific and technological challenge. We investigate the response of magnetic ellipsoidal particles adsorbed at fluid-fluid interfaces to external magnetic fields. By exploiting…
Charged colloidal particles trapped at an air--water interface are well known to form an ordered crystal, stabilized by a long ranged repulsion, the details of this repulsion remain something of a mystery, but all experiments performed to…
Small objects floating on a fluid have a tendency to aggregate due to capillary forces. This effect has been used, with the help of a magnetic induction field, to assemble submillimeter metallic spheres into a variety of structures, whose…
We investigate the dynamics of colloids at a fluid interface driven by attractive capillary interactions. At submillimeter length scales, the capillary attraction is formally analogous to two-dimensional gravity. In particular it is a…
Assembly of colloidal particles on fluid interfaces is a promising technique for synthesizing two-dimensional micro-crystalline materials useful in fields as diverse as biomedicine1, materials science2, mineral flotation3 and food…
Colloidal assembly at fluid interfaces has a great potential for the bottom-up fabrication of novel structured materials. However, challenges remain in realizing controllable and tunable assembly of particles into diverse structures.…
Field induced assembly of reconfigurable structures with complex hierarchical configurations has recently become an area of intense research with the promise for exciting applications in programmable self-assembly and nano/microstructure…
The spontaneous organization of particles at the boundary between two fluids is a common occurrence. Scientists have extensively investigated various internal and external factors to manipulate and guide these self-assembly processes. This…
The interplay between shape anisotropy and directed long-range interactions enables the self-assembly of complex colloidal structures. As a recent highlight, ellipsoidal particles polarized in an external electric field were observed to…
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…
We demonstrate a variety of ordered patterns, including hexagonal structures and chains, formed by colloidal particles (droplets) at the free surface of a nematic liquid crystal (LC). The surface placement introduces a new type of particle…