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How thousands of microtubules and molecular motors self-organize into spindles remains poorly understood. By combining static, nanometer-resolution, large-scale electron tomography reconstructions and dynamic, optical-resolution, polarized…
Here we propose a new computational approach to light-to-matter interactions in silicon nanopillars, which simulates heat generation and propagation dynamics occurring in continuous wave laser processing over a wide temporal range (from 1…
Light provides a powerful means of controlling physical behavior of materials but is rarely used to power and guide active matter systems. We demonstrate optical control of liquid crystalline topological solitons dubbed "skyrmions", which…
Liquid crystals are synthetic and biological viscoelastic anisotropic soft matter materials that combine liquid fluidity with crystal anisotropy and find use in optical devices, sensor/actuators, lubrication, super-fibers. Frequently…
Biosynthesis of four samples of colloidal suspensions of gold nanoparticles is achieved using hydroalcoholic extract and three different separated compounds of the plant Bacopa procumbens. The nonlinear optical properties of each sample are…
The phenomenological torque balance model previously introduced to describe the electrically assisted light-induced gliding is generalized to study the reorientation dynamics of the nematic liquid crystal easy axis at photoaligned azo-dye…
Disordered dielectrics with structural correlations on length scales comparable to visible light wavelengths exhibit complex optical properties. Such materials exist in nature, leading to beautiful structural non-iridescent color, and they…
Highly efficient and widely applicable working mechanisms that allow nanomaterials and devices to respond to external stimuli with controlled mechanical motions could make far-reaching impact to reconfigurable, adaptive, and robotic…
The motion of an artificial micro-scale swimmer that uses a chemical reaction catalyzed on its own surface to achieve autonomous propulsion is fully characterized experimentally. It is shown that at short times, it has a substantial…
In this letter, we experimentally demonstrate the evolution of the optical vortex beams of different topological charges propagating in engineered nano-colloidal suspension of negative polarizability with saturable nonlinearities. Due to…
The self-assembly of metallic colloidal clusters (so called plasmonic metamolecules) has been viewed as a versatile, but highly effective approach for the materialization of the metamaterials exhibiting artificial magnetism at optical…
Spherical microparticles dispersed in nematic liquid crystals have been extensively investigated in the past years. Here, we report experimental studies on the elastic deformation, colloidal interaction and self-assembly of hematite…
We employ conical refraction of light in a biaxial crystal to create an optical bottle for trapping and manipulation of particles. We show that by just varying the polarization of the input light the bottle can be opened and closed at will.…
We review theoretical explanation of mechanisms of control of uniformity in growth of nanosize particles and colloids. The nanoparticles are synthesized as nanocrystals, by burst nucleation from solution. The colloids are self-assembled by…
Inorganic nanocrystal gels retain distinct properties of individual nanocrystals while offering tunable, network structure-dependent characteristics. We review different mechanisms for assembling gels from colloidal nanocrystals including…
We study azimuthal gliding of the easy axis that occurs in nematic liquid crystals brought in contact with the photoaligned azo-dye film under the action of reorienting UV light combined with an in-plane electric field. For irradiation with…
New materials aim at exploiting the great control of living organisms over molecular architectures and minerals. Optical biomimetics has been widely developed by microengineering, leading to photonic components with order resembling those…
Arrays of optically trapped nanoparticles have emerged as a promising platform for the study of complex non-equilibrium phenomena. Analogous to atomic many-body systems, one of the crucial ingredients is the ability to precisely control the…
DNA-driven self-assembly enables precise positioning of the colloidal nanoparticles owing to specific Watson-Crick interactions. Another important feature of this self-assembly method is its reversibility by controlling the temperature of…
We present a simple motorised rotation mount for a half-wave plate that can be used to rapidly change the polarization of light. We use the device to switch a high power laser beam between different optical dipole traps in an ultracold atom…