Related papers: Liquid Crystal Colloids
As one increases the concentration of a colloidal suspension, the system exhibits a dramatic increase in viscosity. Structurally, the system resembles a liquid, yet motions within the suspension are slow enough that it can be considered…
Colloidal particles trapped at an interface between two fluids can form a wide range of different structures. Replacing one of the fluid with a liquid crystal increases the complexity of interactions and results in a greater range of…
Self-assembly of colloidal particles is poised to become a powerful composite material fabrication technique, but remains challenged by a limited control over the ensuing structures. We develop a new breed of nematic colloids that are…
Crystalline materials, with symmetrical and periodic structures, exhibit a wide spectrum of properties and have been widely used in numerous applications across electronics, energy, and beyond. For crystalline materials discovery,…
The self-assembly of nanocrystals enables new classes of materials whose properties are controlled by the periodicities of the assembly, as well as by the size, shape and composition of the nanocrystals. While self-assembly of spherical…
The interplay between crystal nucleation and the structure of the metastable fluid has been a topic of significant debate over recent years. In particular, it has been suggested that even in simple model systems such as hard or charged…
Smectic liquid crystals are materials formed by stacking deformable, fluid layers. Though smectics prefer to have flat, uniformly-spaced layers, boundary conditions can impose curvature on the layers. Since the layer spacing and curvature…
A recently introduced active phase field crystal model describes the formation of ordered resting and traveling crystals in systems of self-propelled particles. Increasing the active drive, a resting crystal can be forced to perform…
A rigorous theory of liquid-crystal transitions is developed starting from the Liouville equation. The starting point is an all-atom description and a set of order parameter field variables that are shown to evolve slowly via Newton's…
We outline the main ideas behind the numerical modelling of soft-flowing crystals, with special attention to their application to microfluidic devices for the design of novel mesoscale porous materials.
Despite the omnipresence of colloidal suspensions, little is known about the influence of shape on phase transformations, especially in nonequilibrium. To date, real-space imaging results are limited to systems composed of spherical…
Colloids are suspensions of small solid particles in a liquid, and exhibit glassy behavior when the particle concentration is high. In these samples, the particles are roughly analogous to individual molecules in a traditional glass. This…
Liquid crystals are known for their optical birefringence, a property that gives rise to intricate patterns and colors when viewed in a microscope between crossed polarisers. Resulting images are rich in geometric patterns and serve as…
Soft particles are known to overlap and form stable clusters that self-assemble into periodic crystalline phases with density-independent lattice constants. We use molecular dynamics simulations in two dimensions to demonstrate that,…
Unlike atoms, colloidal particles are not identical, but can only be synthesised within a finite size tolerance. Colloids are therefore polydisperse, i.e. mixtures of infinitely many components with sizes drawn from a continuous…
We show in simulations that a rich variety of novel orderings such as pinwheel and star states can be realized for colloidal molecular crystal mixtures at rational ratios of the number of colloids to the number of minima from an underlying…
Knotted fields in classical and quantum systems have long been recognized for their non-trivial topologies and particle-like behavior, but practical applications have been limited by the difficulty of stabilizing them. Recently, stable…
Dust particles immersed within a plasma environment, such as those found in planetary rings or comets, will acquire an electric charge. If the ratio of the inter-particle potential energy to average kinetic energy is large enough the…
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…
We study the self-assembly of branching-chain networks and crystals in a binary colloidal system with tunable interactions. The particle positions are extracted from microscope images and order parameters are extracted by image processing…