Related papers: Magnetic coupling in colloidal clusters for hierar…
The progress of realizing colloidal structures mimicking natural forms of organization in condensed matter is inherently limited by the availability of suitable colloidal building blocks. To enable new forms of crystalline and…
The self-assembly of particles into organized structures is a key feature of living organisms and a major engineering challenge. While it may proceed through the binding of perfectly matched, puzzle-pieces-like particles, many other…
Unlike Stockmayer fluids, that prove to undergo gas-liquid transition on cooling, the system of dipolar hard or soft spheres without any additional central attraction so far has not been shown to have a critical point. Instead, in the…
Small objects floating on a fluid have a tendency to aggregate due to capillary forces. This effect has been used, with the help of a magnetic induction field, to assemble submillimeter metallic spheres into a variety of structures, whose…
One emerging approach for the fabrication of complex architectures on the nanoscale is to utilize particles customized to intrinsically self-assemble into a desired structure. Inverse methods of statistical mechanics have proven…
The properties and applications of metallic nanoparticles are inseparably connected not only to their detailed morphology and composition, but also to their structural configuration and mutual interactions. As a result, the assemblies often…
This paper presents an overview and discussion of magnetocapillary self-assemblies. New results are presented, in particular concerning the possible development of future applications. These self-organizing structures possess the notable…
Monodisperse spherical colloidal particles confined within emulsion droplets can crystallize into icosahedral clusters. Experimentally it was observed that a few large colloidal particles added as defects preferentially migrate to the…
Biological cells self-organize into living materials that uniquely blend structure with functionality and responsiveness to the environment. The integration of similar life-like features in man-made materials remains challenging, yet…
We study the designing principles of the simplest colloidal propeller, an architecture built from four identical spheres that can couple translation with rotation to produce controlled drift motion. By considering superparamagnetic beads,…
Spherical particles confined to a sphere surface cannot pack densely into a hexagonal lattice without defects. In this study, we use hard particle Monte Carlo simulations to determine the effects of continuously deformable shape anisotropy…
Natural materials often feature a combination of soft and stiff phases, arranged to achieve excellent mechanical properties, such as high strength and toughness. Many natural materials have even independently evolved to have similar…
Using Monte Carlo (MC) computer simulations we explore the self-assembly and ordering behavior of a hybrid, soft magnetic system consisting of small magnetic nano-spheres in a liquid-crystalline (LC) matrix. Inspired by recent experiments…
We design a system with a binary suspension of colloids and a surface that triggers the self-assembly of crystallites with a finite thickness. The proposed design allows controlling the number of layers forming the aggregate and constrains…
In contrast to most self-assembling synthetic materials, which undergo unbounded growth, many biological self-assembly processes are self-limited. That is, the assembled structures have one or more finite dimensions that are much larger…
The influence of quadrupolar interactions on the structure of small clusters is investigated by adding a point quadrupole of variable strength to the Lennard-Jones potential. Competition arises between sheet-like arrangements of the…
Self-assembly processes provide the means to achieve scalable and versatile metamaterials by "bottom-up" fabrication. Despite their enormous potential, especially as a platform for energy materials, self-assembled metamaterials are often…
Locally (re)structuring colloidal gels $\unicode{x2013}$ micron-sized particles forming a connected network with arrested dynamics $\unicode{x2013}$ enables precise tuning of the micromechanical and -rheological properties of the system. A…
Recent studies aimed at investigating artificial analogs of bacterial colonies have shown that low-density suspensions of self-propelled particles confined in two dimensions can assemble into finite aggregates that merge and split, but have…
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…