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One of the central experimental efforts in nematic colloids research aims to explore how the interplay between the geometry of particles along with the accompanying nematic director deformations and defects around them can provide a means…
A paradigm for internally driven matter is the active nematic liquid crystal, whereby the equations of a conventional nematic are supplemented by a minimal active stress that violates time reversal symmetry. In practice, active fluids may…
Molecular self-assembly is a well-known technique to create highly functional nanostructures on surfaces. Self-assembly on two-dimensional materials is a developing field and has already resulted in the discovery of several rich and…
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…
Self-assembly is traditionally described as the process through which an initially disordered system relaxes towards an equilibrium ordered phase only driven by local interactions between its building blocks. However, This definition is too…
Topological photonics harnesses the physics of topological insulators to control the behavior of light. Photonic modes robust against material imperfections are an example of such control. In this work, we propose a soft-matter platform…
The acoustic levitation of small particles provides a versatile platform to investigate the collective dynamical properties of self-assembled many-body systems in the presence of hydrodynamic coupling. However, acoustic scattering forces…
Equilibrium self-assembly and conventional materials processing techniques fall far short of mimicking dynamic self-actuating processes that are commonplace throughout biology. To bridge the gap between living and synthetic matter, we study…
Self-assembly of colloidal particles is poised to become a powerful composite material fabrication technique, but remains challenged by a limited control over the ensuing structures. We develop a new breed of nematic colloids that are…
Colloids are abundant in nature, science and technology, with examples ranging from milk to quantum dots and the "colloidal atom" paradigm. Similarly, liquid crystal ordering is important in contexts ranging from biological membranes to…
Thanks to a constant energy input, active matter can self-assemble into phases with complex architectures and functionalities such as living clusters that dynamically form, reshape and break-up, which are forbidden in equilibrium materials…
The transport of motile entities across modulated energy landscapes plays an important role in a range of phenomena in biology, colloidal science and solid-state physics. Here, an easily implementable strategy that allows for the collective…
Motor-proteins are responsible for transport inside cells. Harnessing their activity is key towards developing new nano-technologies, or functional biomaterials. Cytoskeleton-like networks, recently tailored in vitro, result from the…
Soft actuators allow to transform external stimuli to mechanical deformations. Because of their deformational response to external magnetic fields, magnetic gels and elastomers represent ideal candidates for such tasks. Mostly, linear…
Moving nanoparticles/atoms to study the nearfield interaction between them is one of the many approaches to explore the optical and electrical properties of these assemblies. Traditional approach included the self assembly by spinning or…
Self-assembly in natural and synthetic molecular systems can create complex aggregates or materials whose properties and functionality rises from their internal structure and molecular arrangement. The key microscopic features that control…
A theory describing the forces governing the self-assembly of nanoparticles at the solid-liquid interface is developed. In the process, new theoretical results are derived to describe the effect that the field penetration of a point-like…
Standard approaches to magneto-mechanical interactions in thermal magnetic crystalline solids involve Landau functionals in which the lattice anisotropy and the resulting magnetization easy axes are taken explicitly into account. In glassy…
For the study of crystal formation and dynamics we introduce a simple two-dimensional monatomic model system with a parametrized interaction potential. We find in molecular dynamics simulations that a surprising variety of crystals, a…
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…