Related papers: Variational design principles for nonequilibrium c…
The ability to control forces between sub-micron-scale building blocks offers considerable potential for designing new materials through self-assembly. A typical paradigm is to first identify a particular (crystal) structure that has some…
Anisotropy at the level of the inter-particle interaction provides the particles with specific instructions for the self-assembly of target structures. The ability to synthesize non-spherical colloids, together with the possibility of…
Both biological and artificial self-assembly processes can take place by a range of different schemes, from the successive addition of identical building blocks, to hierarchical sequences of intermediates, all the way to the fully…
The shear-banding instability in quasi-statically driven bulk metallic glasses emerges from collective dynamics, mediated by shear transformation zones and associated non-local elastic interactions. It is also phenomenologically known that…
We examine microstructural and mechanical changes which occur during oscillatory shear flow and reformation after flow cessation of an intermediate volume fraction colloidal gel using rheometry and Brownian Dynamics (BD) simulations. A…
The self-assembly of anisotropic building blocks into complex spatial architectures is an important design strategy in material science but the mechanisms by which the anisotropic interactions influence the early-stage growth and formation…
While colloids are promising building blocks for the self-assembly of materials with novel microstructures, their numerous tunable parameters inhibit brute force searching for appropriate parameter combinations that yield self-assembly of a…
Multi-component self-assembly mixtures offer the possibility of encoding multiple target structures with the same set of interacting components. Selective retrieval of one of the stored structures has been attempted by preparing an initial…
We examine the structure and dynamics of small isolated $N$-particle clusters interacting via short-ranged Morse potentials. "Ideally preprared ensembles" obtained via exact enumeration studies of sticky hard sphere packings serve as…
Recent advances in synthetic methods enable designing subunits that self-assemble into structures with precise, finite sizes and well-defined architectures, but yields are frequently suppressed by the formation of off-target metastable…
We outline a basic strategy of how self-propulsion can be used to improve the yield of a typical colloidal self-assembly process. The success of this approach is predicated on the thoughtful design of the colloidal building block as well as…
Rational design strategies for self-assembly require a detailed understanding of both the equilibrium state and the assembly kinetics. While the former is starting to be well understood, the latter remains a major theoretical challenge,…
This article reviews recent inverse statistical-mechanical methodologies that we have devised to optimize interaction potentials in soft matter systems that correspond to stable "target" structures. We are interested in finding 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…
The properties of small clusters can differ dramatically from the bulk phases of the same constituents. In equilibrium, cluster assembly has been recently explored, whereas out of equilibrium, the physical principles of clustering remain…
Modern experimental methods enable the creation of self-assembly building blocks with tunable interactions, but optimally exploiting this tunability for the self-assembly of desired structures remains an important challenge. Many studies of…
Designing components that can robustly self-assemble into structures with biological complexity is a grand challenge for material science. Proofreading and error correction is required to improve assembly yield beyond equilibrium limits,…
The field of complex self-assembly is moving toward the design of multi-particle structures consisting of thousands of distinct building blocks. To exploit the potential benefits of structures with such `addressable complexity,' we need to…
A variational framework, initially developed for high-order mesh optimisation, is being extended for r-adaptation. The method is based on the minimisation of a functional of the mesh deformation. To achieve adaptation, elements of the…
The goal of inverse self-assembly is to design inter-particle interactions capable of assembling the units into a desired target structure. The effective assembly of complex structures often requires the use of multiple components, each new…