Related papers: Breaking Chiral Symmetry with Microfluidics
Recent progress in colloidal science has led to elaborate self-assembled structures whose complexity raises hopes for elaborating new materials. However, the throughputs are extremely low and consequently, the chance to produce materials of…
We develop a family of chiral measures to quantify the chirality of a distribution and assign it a handedness. Our measures are built using the tensorial moments of the distribution, which naturally encode its spatial character, not only…
Encapsulation of chemicals using polymer membranes enables to control their transport and delivery for applications such as agrochemistry or detergency. To rationalize the design of polymer capsules, it is necessary to understand how the…
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…
Ultrasound-vaporizable microdroplets can be exploited for targeted drug delivery. However, it requires customized microfluidic techniques able to produce monodisperse, capillary-sized and biocompatible multiple emulsions. Recent development…
Colloidal crystal structures with complexity and diversity rivaling atomic and molecular crystals have been predicted and obtained for hard particles by entropy maximization. However, so far homochiral colloidal crystals, which are…
Microfluidic chips provide unparalleled control over droplets and jets, which have advanced all natural sciences. However, microfluidic applications could be vastly expanded by increasing the per-channel throughput and directly exploiting…
Modern micromanipulation techniques typically involve trapping using electromagnetic, acoustic or flow fields that produce stresses on the trapped particles thereby precluding stress-free manipulations. Here, we show that by employing…
Most animal body plans have some degree of left-right asymmetry. This chirality at the tissue and organ level is often assumed to originate from the intrinsic handedness of biological molecules. How this handedness might be transferred from…
There is considerable interest in understanding and controlling topological defects in nematic liquid crystals (LCs). Confinement, in the form of droplets, has been particularly effective in that regard. Here, we employ the Landau-de Gennes…
Large-scale microfluidic microsystems with complex three-dimensional (3D) configurations are highly in demand by both fundamental research and industrial application, holding the potentials for fostering a wide range of innovative…
Many biological and synthetic materials self-assemble into helical or twisted aggregates. The shape is determined by a complex interplay between elastic forces and the orientation and chirality of the constituent molecules. We study this…
Droplet-based microfluidics systems have become widely used in recent years thanks to their advantages, varying from the possibility of handling small fluid volumes to directly synthesizing and encapsulating various living forms for…
Handedness of the director twist in cholesteric liquid crystals is commonly assumed to be the same throughout the medium, determined solely by the chirality of constituent molecules or chiral additives, albeit distortions of the…
Compared to isotropic liquids, orientational order of nematic liquid crystals makes their rheological properties more involved, and thus requires fine control of the flow parameters to govern the orientational patterns. In microfluidic…
Predicting the macroscopic chiral behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystals from the microscopic chirality of the particles is highly non-trivial, even when the chiral interactions are purely entropic in nature. Here we introduce a novel…
A rectangular grid formed by liquid filaments on a partially wetting substrate evolves in a series of breakups leading to arrays of drops with different shapes distributed in a rather regular bidimensional pattern. Our study is focused on…
We present a coarse-grained single-site potential for simulating chiral interactions, with adjustable strength, handedness, and preferred twist angle. As an application, we perform basin-hopping global optimisation to predict the favoured…
Quasicrystals are unique materials characterized by long-range order without periodicity. They are observed in systems such as metallic alloys, soft matter, and particle simulations. Unlike periodic crystals, which are invariant under…
Geometrical chirality is a universal property encountered on very different length scales ranging from geometrical shapes of living organisms to protein and DNA molecules. Interaction of chiral matter with chiral light - that is,…