Related papers: Formation of liquid shells in active droplet syste…
Phase separation in passive systems leads to uncontrolled droplet growth, limiting structural control in soft materials and cells. We identify a generic mechanism to arrest coarsening based on chemical interconversion between molecular…
We numerically investigate the phase behavior of thick shells of cholesteric liquid crystals with tangential anchoring at the shell boundary. For achiral liquid crystal, we demonstrate a thickness-dependent transition from a configuration…
Forming an interface between immiscible fluids incurs a free-energy cost that usually favors minimizing the interfacial area. An emulsion droplet of fixed volume therefore tends to form a sphere, and pairs of droplets tend to coalesce.…
We consider two minimal models of active fluid droplets that exhibit complex dynamics including steady motion, deformation, rotation and oscillating motion. First we consider a droplet with a concentration of active contractile matter…
It has been proposed that during the early steps in the origin of life, small droplets could have formed via the segregation of molecules from complex mixtures by phase separation. These droplets could have provided chemical reaction…
We report a molecular dynamics simulation demonstrating that a columnar liquid crystal, commonly formed by disc-shaped molecules, can be formed by identical particles interacting via a spherically symmetric potential. Upon isochoric cooling…
We investigate the behavior of a mixture of asymmetric colloidal dumbbells and emulsion droplets by means of kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. The evaporation of the droplets and the competition between droplet-colloid attraction and…
All liquids (except helium due to quantum effects) crystallize at low temperatures, forming ordered structures. The competition between disorder, which stabilizes the liquid phase, and energy, which favors the ordered crystalline structure,…
Using controlled spinodal decomposition, we have created a fluid-bicontinuous structure stabilized by colloidal particles. We present confocal microscopy studies of these structures and their variation with kinetic pathway. Our studies…
We present a confocal-microscopy study of demixing and remixing in binary liquids containing colloidal particles. First, particle-stabilized emulsions have been fabricated by nucleation and growth of droplets upon cooling from the…
Active droplets can swim spontaneously in viscous flows as a result of the non-linear convective transport of a chemical solute produced at their surface by the Marangoni and/or phoretic flows generated by this solute's inhomogeneous…
The effect of polydispersity on the phase behaviour of hard spheres is examined using a moment projection method. It is found that the Boublik-Mansoori-Carnahan-Starling-Leland equation of state shows a spinodal instability for a bimodal…
Liquids in systems with spherically symmetric interactions are not thermodynamically stable when the range of the attraction is reduced sufficiently. However, these metastable liquids have lifetimes long enough that they are readily…
We study the thermodynamics of binary mixtures with the volume fraction of the minority component less than the amount required to form a flat interface and show that the surface tension dominated equilibrium phase of the mixture forms a…
We report on the emergence of spontaneously rotating clusters in active emulsions. Ensembles of self-propelling droplets sediment and then self-organise into planar, hexagonally ordered clusters which hover over the container bottom while…
The translation and shape deformations of a passive viscous Newtonian droplet immersed in an active nematic liquid crystal under circular confinement are analyzed using a linear stability analysis. We focus on the case of a sharply aligned…
We study the linear stability of an isotropic active fluid in three different geometries: a film of active fluid on a rigid substrate, a cylindrical thread of fluid, and a spherical fluid droplet. The active fluid is modeled by the…
We study a continuum model of an extensile active nematic to show that mesoscale turbulence develops in two stages: (i) ordered regions undergo an intrinsic hydrodynamic instability generating walls, lines of stong bend deformations, (ii)…
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 experimentally investigate the dynamics of synthetic active particles composed of gravitationally bouncing, superwalking droplets confined within an annular fluid bath. Driven by a topologically pumping dual-frequency waveform, the…