Related papers: Metallization of colloidal crystals
An increasing variety of crystal structures has been observed in soft condensed matter over the past two decades, surpassing most expectations for the diversity of arrangements accessible through classical driving forces. Here, we survey…
In a cluster crystal, each lattice site is occupied by multiple soft-core particles. As the number density is increased at zero temperature, a `cascade' of isostructural phase transitions can occur between states whose site occupancy…
There is growing interest in functional, adaptive devices built from colloidal subunits of micron size or smaller. A colloidal material with dynamic mechanical properties could facilitate such microrobotic machines. Here we study via…
Most elemental metals under ambient conditions adopt simple structures such as BCC, FCC and HCP in specific groupings across the Periodic Table, and on compression, many of these elements undergo transitions to surprisingly complex…
Electronic tunability in crystals with weakly-bound layers can be achieved through layer stacking order. One such example is MoTe$_2$, where the low-temperature orthorhombic T$_d$ phase is topological and host to Weyl quasiparticles. The…
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…
When metals are magnetized, emulsions phase separate, or galaxies cluster, domain walls and patterns form and irremediably coarsen over time. Such coarsening is universally driven by diffusive relaxation toward equilibrium. Here, we…
Manipulating the way in which colloidal particles self-organise is a central challenge in the design of functional soft materials. Meeting this challenge requires the use of building blocks that interact with one another in a highly…
Transition metal dichalcogenides exhibit a wide range of semiconducting, metallic, correlated, and topological electronic states that arise from strong coupling between lattice structure, dimensionality, and electronic degrees of freedom.…
In colloid and nanoparticle chemistry, particle size, shape, crystallinity, surface morphology and composition are controlled by employing the mechanisms of burst nucleation, diffusional growth, aggregation, or their combinations. Here we…
We study colloidal ordering and disordering on two-dimensional periodic substrates where the number of colloids per substrate minima is two or three. The colloids form dimer or trimer states with orientational ordering, referred to as…
It is shown that in crystal lattices with a basis the cooperative behavior of a certain type of atoms performing optical long-wavelength vibrations in a double-well potential of the field of the matrix lattice may lead to the formation of a…
Spherical colloidal crystals (CCs) self-assemble on the interface between two liquids. These 2D structures unconventionally combine local hexagonal order and spherical geometry. Nowadays CCs are actively studied by altering their…
The behavior of identical particles interacting through the harmonic-repulsive pair potential has been studied in 3D using molecular dynamics simulations at a number of different densities. We found that at many densities, as the…
Active elastomeric liquid crystal particles with initial cylindrical shapes are obtained by means of soft lithography and polymerization in a strong magnetic field. Gold nanocrystals infiltrated into these particles mediate energy transfer…
Melting of two-dimensional (2D) equilibrium crystals, from superconducting vortex lattices to colloidal structures, is a complex phenomenon characterized by the sequential loss of positional and orientational order. Whereas melting…
We generalize, and then use, a recently introduced formalism to study thermal fluctuations of atomic displacements in several two and three dimensional crystals. We study both close packed as well as open crystals with multi atom bases.…
Lattice dynamical methods used to predict phase-transformations in crystals typically evaluate the harmonic phonon spectra and therefore do not work in frequent and important situations where the crystal structure is unstable in the…
Orientational and positional ordering properties of liquid crystal monolayers are examined by means of Fundamental-Measure Density Functional Theory. Particles forming the monolayer are modeled as hard parallelepipeds of square section of…
We investigate two-dimensional crystal assemblies formed by a binary mixture of colloidal particles with a size ratio of 0.88 and driven by short-ranged depletion interactions. Our experiments show that the orientational order of the…