Related papers: Timed material self-assembly controlled by circadi…
The use of colloidal supported lipid bilayers (CSLBs) has recently been extended to create colloidal joints, that - in analogy to their macroscopic counterparts - can flexibly connect colloidal particles. These novel elements enable the…
Molecular motors are essential to the living, they generate additional fluctuations that boost transport and assist assembly. Self-propelled colloids, that consume energy to move, hold similar potential for the man-made assembly of…
The gene networks that comprise the circadian clock modulate biological function across a range of scales, from gene expression to performance and adaptive behaviour. The clock functions by generating endogenous rhythms that can be…
Time crystalline structures can be created in periodically driven systems. They are temporal lattices which can reveal different condensed matter behaviours ranging from Anderson localization in time to temporal analogues of many-body…
We use computer simulations to investigate self-assembly in a system of model chaperonin proteins, and in an Ising lattice gas. We discuss the mechanisms responsible for rapid and efficient assembly in these systems, and we use measurements…
The design of intelligent materials often draws parallels with the complex adaptive behaviors of biological organisms, where robust functionality stems from sophisticated hierarchical organization and emergent long-distance coordination…
Biochemical oscillations are prevalent in living organisms. Systems with a small number of constituents cannot sustain coherent oscillations for an indefinite time because of fluctuations in the period of oscillation. We show that the…
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…
Incorporating cells within active biomaterial scaffolds is a promising strategy to develop forefront materials that can autonomously sense, respond, and alter the scaffold in response to environmental cues or internal cell circuitry. Using…
Although buckling is a prime route to achieve functionalization and synthesis of single colloids, buckling of colloidal structures---made up of multiple colloids---remains poorly studied. Here, we investigate the buckling of the simplest…
Self-propelled colloidal particles exhibit rich non-equilibrium phenomena and have promising applications in fields such as drug delivery and self-assembled active materials. Previous experimental and theoretical studies have shown that…
Machines enabled the Industrial Revolution and are central to modern technological progress: A machine's parts transmit forces, motion, and energy to one another in a predetermined manner. Today's engineering frontier, building artificial…
Living organisms need to be sensitive to a changing environment while also ignoring uninformative environmental fluctuations. Here, we show that the circadian clock in \textit{Synechococcus elongatus} can naturally tune its environmental…
Designing protocols to dynamically direct the self-assembly of colloidal particles has become an important direction in soft matter physics because of the promising applications in fabrication of dynamic responsive functional materials.…
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…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
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…
We study the self-assembly of branching-chain networks and crystals in a binary colloidal system with tunable interactions. The particle positions are extracted from microscope images and order parameters are extracted by image processing…
Soft particles are known to overlap and form stable clusters that self-assemble into periodic crystalline phases with density-independent lattice constants. We use molecular dynamics simulations in two dimensions to demonstrate that,…
Physical aging in polymers is a fundamental yet poorly understood phenomenon, as diverse macromolecular systems exhibit remarkably similar slow dynamics. Through molecular dynamics simulations of physically crosslinked networks composed of…