Related papers: Porous crystals in charged sphere suspensions by a…
Viscoelastic phase separation of colloidal suspensions can be interrupted to form gels either by glass transition or by crystallization. With a new confocal microscopy protocol, we follow the entire kinetics of phase separation, from…
Colloidal glasses form from hard spheres, nearly hard spheres, ellipsoids and platelets or their attractive variants have been studied in detail. Complementing and checking theoretical approaches and simulations, the many different types of…
Micrometre sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size, shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures and phases, in which the thermal motions of particles can be…
We study the phase behavior of hard spheres confined between two parallel hard plates using extensive computer simulations. We determine the full equilibrium phase diagram for arbitrary densities and plate separations from one to five…
We studied the phase behavior of charged and sterically stabilized colloids using confocal microscopy in a less polar solvent (dielectric constant 5.4). Upon increasing the colloid volume fraction we found a transition from a fluid to a…
This paper describes an experimental study of filtration of a colloidal suspension using microfluidic devices. A suspension of micrometer-scale colloids flows through parallel slit-shaped pores at fixed pressure drop. Clogs and cakes are…
In recent years, experimental and theoretical investigations have shown that anisotropic colloids can self-organise into ordered porous monolayers, where the interplay of localised bonding sites, so called patches, with the particle's shape…
Unlike atoms, colloidal particles are not identical, but can only be synthesised within a finite size tolerance. Colloids are therefore polydisperse, i.e. mixtures of infinitely many components with sizes drawn from a continuous…
Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals can form new materials with tunable elastic and electro-optic properties. In a periodic `blue phase' host, particles should template into colloidal crystals with potential uses in photonics,…
Colloidal model systems allow for a flexible tuning of particle sizes, particle spacings and mutual interactions at constant temperature. Colloidal suspensions typically crystallize as soon as the interactions get sufficiently strong and…
We study low-salt, binary aqueous suspensions of charged colloidal spheres of size ratio Phi = 0.57, number densities below the eutectic number density n_E, and number fractions of p = 1.00-0.40. The typical phase obtained by solidification…
Phase transformations can be difficult to characterize at the microscopic level due to the inability to directly observe individual atomic motions. Model colloidal systems, by contrast, permit the direct observation of individual particle…
In this article, we demonstrate a method for inducing reversible crystal-to-crystal transitions in binary mixtures of soft colloidal particles. Through a controlled decrease of salinity and increasingly dominating electrostatic…
A recently introduced active phase field crystal model describes the formation of ordered resting and traveling crystals in systems of self-propelled particles. Increasing the active drive, a resting crystal can be forced to perform…
We study the phase ordering colloids suspended in a thermotropic nematic liquid crystal below the clearing point Tni and the resulting aggregated structure. Small (150nm) PMMA particles are dispersed in a classical liquid crystal matrix,…
It is shown that porous spherical particles can be obtained via the freezing of silica nanoparticle aqueous suspensions emulsified in a continuous oil phase. After two freeze-thaw cycles, nanoparticles turn aggregated into flocculated…
Colloidal suspensions are simple model systems for the study of phase transitions. Video microscopy is capable of directly imaging the structure and dynamics of colloidal suspensions in different phases. Recent results related to…
We report simulations on the homogeneous liquid-fcc nucleation of charged colloids for both low and high contact energy values. As a precursor for crystal formation, we observe increased local order at the position where the crystal will…
We study the kinetics of the liquid-to-crystal transformation and of gel formation in colloidal suspensions of oppositely charged particles. We analyse, by means of both computer simulations and experiments, the evolution of a fluid…
Field-induced assembly of colloidal particles into structures of desired configurations is extremely relevant from the viewpoint of producing field-assembled micro-swimmers and reconfigurable smart materials. However, the behaviour of…