Related papers: Pinning Dislocations in Colloidal Crystals with Ac…
In recent years there has been renewed interest in the behavior of dislocations in crystals that exhibit strong atomic scale disorder, as typical of compositionally complex single phase alloys. The behavior of dislocations in such crystals…
Dislocation pinning plays a vital role in the plastic behaviour of a crystalline solid. Here we report the first observation of the damped oscillations of a mobile dislocation after it gets pinned at an obstacle in the presence of a…
We study experimentally and numerically the motion of a self-phoretic active particle in two-dimensional (2D) loosely-packed colloidal crystals at fluid interfaces. Two scenarios emerge depending on the interaction between the active…
Dislocations, line defects in crystalline materials, play an essential role in the mechanical[1,2], electrical[3], optical[4], thermal[5], and phase transition[6] properties of these materials. Dislocation motion, an important mechanism…
Crystallization through vapor deposition is ubiquitous, and is inevitably influenced by impurities, which often impact the local structure. Interestingly, the effect of immobilizing some of the depositing particles themselves, which would…
Micrometre sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size, shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures and phases, in which the thermal motions of particles can be…
Control of physical behaviors of nematic colloids and colloidal crystals has been demonstrated by tuning particle shape, topology, chirality and surface charging. However, the capability of altering physical behaviors of such soft matter…
Active colloidal particles provide versatile model systems for exploring non-equilibrium physics in motile matter. To date, most experimental realizations have focused on spherical particles, largely due to fabrication constraints. However,…
Active motion at complex fluid-fluid interfaces is a ubiquitous phenomenon in nature. However, an intriguing question that is not fully addressed is how active motion affects and gets influenced by its complex environment. Here, we design a…
The transport properties of colloidal particles in active liquids have been studied extensively. It has led to a deeper understanding of the interactions between passive and active particles. However, the phase behavior of colloidal…
Impurity-induced defects play a crucial role for the properties of crystals, but little is known about impurities with anisotropic shape. Here, we study how colloidal dumbbells distort and interact with a hexagonal crystal of charged…
Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…
Atomic crystals with dislocations deform plastically at low stresses via dislocation glide. Whether dislocation glide occurs in macroscopic frictional granular media has remained unknown. The discrete element method is employed to simulate…
At high area fractions, monolayers of colloidal dimer particles form a degenerate crystal (DC) structure in which the particle lobes occupy triangular lattice sites while the particles are oriented randomly along any of the three lattice…
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…
Physical properties of colloidal materials can be modified by addition of nanoparticles. Within a model of like-charged mixtures of particles governed by effective electrostatic interactions, we explore the influence of charged…
How frictional effects emerge at the microscopic level in particulate materials remains a challenging question, particularly in systems subject to thermal fluctuations due to the transient nature of interparticle contacts. Here, we directly…
Using the spectral approach, we analyze the effective properties of a composite which deviates slightly from periodicity. We find that, when the inclusions are randomly displaced from their equilibrium positions, the sharp resonances seen…
Spatial ordering of matter elicits exotic properties sometimes absent from a material's constituents. A few highly mineralised natural materials achieve high toughness through delocalised damage, whereas synthetic particulate composites…
Colloidal particles hold promise for mobilizing and removing trapped immiscible fluids from porous media, with implications for key energy and water applications. Most studies focus on accomplishing this goal using particles that can…