Related papers: Assembly of particle strings via isotropic potenti…
The design of complex materials and the formation of specific patterns often arise from the properties of the individual building blocks. In this respect, colloidal systems offer a unique opportunity because nowadays they can be synthesized…
Colloids can acquire a dipolar interaction in the presence of an external electric field. At high field strength, the particles form strings in the field direction. However at weaker field strength, competition with isotropic interactions…
We propose an optimisation method for the inverse structural design of self-assembly of anisotropic patchy particles. The anisotropic interaction can be expressed by the spherical harmonics of the surface pattern on a patchy particle, and…
Patchy colloids are promising candidates for building blocks in directed self-assembly. To be successful the surface patterns need to both be simple enough to be synthesized, while feature-rich enough to cause the colloids to self-assemble…
We combine experiments and theory to investigate the orientational dynamics of dipolar ellipsoids, which self-assemble into elongated ribbon-like structures due to the presence in each particle of a permanent magnetic moment perpendicular…
The precise arrangement of microscopic objects is critical to the development of functional materials and ornately patterned surfaces. Here, we present an acoustics-based method for the rapid arrangement of microscopic particles into…
We formulate statistical-mechanical inverse methods in order to determine optimized interparticle interactions that spontaneously produce target many-particle configurations. Motivated by advances that give experimentalists greater and…
The spontaneous assembly of particles in suspension provides a strategy for inexpensive fabrication of devices with nanometer-scale control, such as single-electron transistors for memory or logic applications. A scaleable and robust method…
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…
In recent years, experimental and theoretical investigations have shown that anisotropic colloids can self-organise into ordered porous monolayers, where the interplay of localised bonding sites, so called patches, with the particle's shape…
Colloidal self-assembly -- the spontaneous organization of colloids into ordered structures -- has been considered key to produce next-generation materials. However, the present-day staggering variety of colloidal building blocks and the…
A method to couple interparticle contact models with Stokesian dynamics (SD) is introduced to simulate colloidal aggregates under flow conditions. The contact model mimics both the elastic and plastic behavior of the cohesive connections…
Structural defects are ubiquitous in condensed matter, and not always a nuisance. For example, they underlie phenomena such as Anderson localization and hyperuniformity, and they are now being exploited to engineer novel materials. Here, we…
Attractive dipole interactions can be induced between equally charged soft nanoparticles under the influence of AC electric fields. The combination of charge repulsion and dipole attraction, along with different screening responses from an…
Nanoparticles with "sticky patches" have long been proposed as building blocks for the self-assembly of complex structures. The synthetic realizability of such patchy particles, however, greatly lags behind predictions of patterns they…
Colloids that interact via a short-range attraction serve as the primary building blocks for a broad range of self-assembled materials. However, one of the well-known drawbacks to this strategy is that these building blocks rapidly and…
Conventional wisdom presumes that low-coordinated crystal ground states require directional interactions. Using our recently introduced optimization procedure to achieve self-assembly of targeted structures (Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 228301…
Colloidal systems find important applications ranging from fabrication of photonic crystals to direct probing of phenomena typically encountered in atomic crystals and glasses. New applications - such as nanoantennas, plasmonic sensors, and…
Inclusions dissolved in an anisotropic quasi-2D membrane acquire new types of interactions that can drive assembly of complex structures and patterns. We study colloidal membranes composed of a binary mixture of long and short rods, such…
The self-organization of clusters of particles is a fundamental phenomenon across various physical systems, including hydrodynamic and colloidal systems. One example is that of dense spherical particles submerged in a fluid and subjected to…