Related papers: Self-assembly dynamics of reconfigurable colloidal…
Polymer-Attenuated Coulombic Self-Assembly (PACS) is a flexible experimental approach for generating crystals from simple colloidal building blocks. The central components are charged spherical particles coated with a polymer brush that…
Concentrated solutions of short blunt-ended DNA duplexes, down to 6 base pairs, are known to order into the nematic liquid crystal phase. This self-assembly is due to the stacking interactions between the duplex terminals that promotes…
Active fluids generate spontaneous, often chaotic mesoscale flows. Harnessing these flows to drive embedded soft materials into structures with controlled length scales and lifetimes is a key challenge at the interface between the fields of…
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…
Establishing precise control over the shape and the interactions of the microscopic building blocks is essential for design of macroscopic soft materials with novel structural, optical and mechanical properties. Here, we demonstrate robust…
Biological systems exploit self-assembly to create complex structures whose arrangements are finely controlled from molecular to mesoscopic level. Herein we report an example of using fully synthetic systems that mimic two levels of…
We investigate the structure and equilibrium linear-response dynamics of suspensions of hard colloidal dumbbells using Brownian Dynamics computer simulations. The focus lies on the dense fluid and plastic crystal states of the colloids with…
It is widely accepted that self-assembling building blocks is one of the promising ways for engineering new materials. Recent years reveal substantial progress in fabricating colloidal particles, polymer blocks and supramolecular aggregates…
I consider a generic coarse-grained model suitable for the study of bulk self-assembly of liquid crystal (LC) macromolecules. The cases include LC dendrimers, gold nanoparticles modified by polymer chains with terminating LC groups and…
Self-assembly at submicroscopic scales is an important but little understood phenomenon. A prominent example is virus capsid growth, whose underlying behavior can be modeled using simple particles that assemble into polyhedral shells.…
The rapid progress in precisely designing the surface decoration of patchy colloidal particles offers a new, yet unexperienced freedom to create building entities for larger, more complex structures in soft matter systems. However, it is…
We survey our research on modeling the mechanisms of control of uniformity in growth of nanosize and colloid particles. The former are produced as nanocrystals, by burst-nucleation from solution. The latter, colloid-size particles, are…
We study the effects of the optical binding force on wavelength sized colloidal particles free to move in a counter-propagating beam. This work is motivated by the concept of using optical binding to direct the assembly of large numbers of…
We study mutual alignment and interactions between colloidal particles of dissimilar shapes and dimensions when dispersed in a nematic host fluid. Convex pentagonal and concave starfruit-shaped nanoprisms and microspheres induce dipolar or…
Molecules with versatile functionalities and well-defined structures, can serve as building blocks for extreme nanoscale devices. This requires their precise integration into functional heterojunctions, most commonly in the form of…
Endowing materials with physical intelligence holds the key for a progress leap in robotic systems. In spite of the growing success for macroscopic devices, transferring these concepts to the microscale presents several challenges connected…
The formation of a viral capsid -- the highly-ordered protein shell that surrounds the genome of a virus -- is the canonical example of self-assembly. The capsids of many positive-sense RNA viruses spontaneously assemble from in vitro…
The spontaneous assembly of particles in suspension provides a strategy for inexpensive fabrication of devices with nanometer-scale control, such as single-electron transistors for memory or logic applications. A scaleable and robust method…
Results from molecular dynamics simulations of simple, structured particles capable of self-assembling into polyhedral shells are described. The analysis focuses on the growth histories of individual shells in the presence of an explicit…
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…