Related papers: Flexible Colloidal Molecules with Directional Bond…
We study the self-assembly of colloidal microgel particles at a quasi-two-dimensional air-water interface of a drying droplet. Using bright-field microscopy, we demonstrate that increasing particle elasticity drives interfacial organization…
The ability to dictate colloid motion is an important challenge in fields ranging from materials science to living systems. Here, by embedding energy landscapes in confined nematic liquid crystals, we design a versatile platform to define…
Colloidal gels possess a memory of previous shear events, both steady and oscillatory. This memory, embedded in the microstructure, affects the mechanical response of the gel, and therefore enables precise tuning of the material properties…
The appealing feature of molecular electronics is the possibility of exploiting functionality built within a single molecule. This functionality can be employed, for example, for sensing or switching purposes. Thus, ideally, the associated…
We introduce a simple spherical model whose structural properties are similar to the ones generated by models with directional interactions, by employing a binary mixture of large and small hard spheres, with a square-well attraction acting…
We propose a new strategy to improve the self-assembly properties of DNA-functionalised colloids. The problem that we address is that DNA-functionalised colloids typically crystallize in a narrow temperature window, if at all. The…
Chirality is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the natural world. Many biomolecules without inversion symmetry such as amino acids and sugars are chiral molecules. Measuring and controlling molecular chirality at a high precision down to the…
The coexistence and competition of superconductivity and magnetism can lead to a variety of rich physics and technological applications. Recent discovery of atomic-layer superconductors and self-assembly of magnetic molecules on solid…
Recent experiments have led to active colloidal molecules which aggregate from non-motile building blocks and acquire self-propulsion through their non-reciprocal interactions. Here, we model the collective behavior of such active molecules…
The scaled-up qubits proposed are molecules which display large amplitude motions at very low temperatures and the matrix that traps them. These comprise ionic solids such as ammonium tetraphenylborate (ATPB) or methane dilute in a xenon…
Recent theories predict that when a supercooled liquid approaches the glass transition, particle clusters with a special "amorphous order" nucleate within the liquid, which lead to static correlations dictating the dramatic slowdown of…
Large molecules have complex potential-energy surfaces with many local minima. They exhibit multiple stereo-isomers, even at very low temperatures. In this paper we discuss the different approaches for the manipulation of the motion of…
Thermo-responsive hydrogels are a promising material for creating controllable actuators for use in micro-scale devices, since they expand and contract significantly (absorbing or expelling fluid) in response to relatively small temperature…
At the cutting edge of materials science, matter is designed to self-organize into structures that perform a wide range of functions. The past two decades have witnessed major innovations in the versatility of building blocks, ranging from…
We employ Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the self-assembly of patchy colloidal dumbbells interacting via a modified Kern-Frenkel potential by probing the system concentration and dumbbell shape. We consider dumbbells consisting of…
The dynamics of a spherical chemically-powered synthetic colloidal motor that operates by a self-diffusiophoretic mechanism and has a catalytic domain of arbitrary shape is studied using both continuum theory and particle-based simulations.…
The locomotion of flexible membrane-like organisms on top of curved surfaces appears in different contexts and scales. Still, such dynamics have not yet been quantitatively modeled and no realization of such motion in manmade systems has…
Macroscopic elastic core-shell systems can be generated as toy models to be deformed and haptically studied by hand. On the mesoscale, colloidal core-shell particles and microgels are fabricated and investigated by different types of…
The self-assembly of polyhedral shells, each constructed from 60 trapezoidal particles, is simulated using molecular dynamics. The spatial organization of the component particles in this shell is similar to the capsomer proteins forming the…
We study the formation of a colloidal gel by means of Molecular Dynamics simulations of a model for colloidal suspensions. A slowing down with gel-like features is observed at low temperatures and low volume fractions, due to the formation…