Related papers: Macromolecular crowding in chiral assembly of elli…
Particles with directional interactions are promising building blocks for new functional materials and may serve as models for biological structures. Mutually attractive nanoparticles that are deformable due to flexible surface groups, for…
Colloidal particles, amphiphiles, and functionalized nanoparticles are examples of systems that frequently exhibit short-range attractions coupled with long-range repulsions. In this work, we observe striking differences in the dynamics of…
The simplest prescription for building a patterned structure from its constituents is to add particles, one at a time, to an appropriate template. However, self-organizing molecular and colloidal systems in nature can evolve in much more…
Entropy alone can self-assemble hard particles into colloidal crystals of remarkable complexity whose structures are the same as atomic and molecular crystals, but with larger lattice spacings. Although particle-based molecular simulation…
Attractive dipole interactions can be induced between equally charged soft nanoparticles under the influence of AC electric fields. The combination of charge repulsion and dipole attraction, along with different screening responses from an…
The generation of nanoscale square and stripe patterns is of major technological importance since they are compatible with industry-standard electronic circuitry. Recently, a blend of diblock copolymer interacting via hydrogen-bonding was…
The self-assembly of binary nanoparticle superlattices from colloidal mixtures is a promising method for the fabrication of complex colloidal co-crystal structures. However, binary mixtures often form amorphous or metastable phases instead…
Predicting the macroscopic chiral behaviour of cholesteric liquid crystals from the microscopic chirality of the particles is highly non-trivial, even when the chiral interactions are purely entropic in nature. Here we introduce a novel…
Hypothesis: Colloidal molecules with anisotropic shapes and interactions are powerful model systems for deciphering the behavior of real molecules and building units for creating materials with designed properties. While many strategies for…
Manipulating the way in which colloidal particles self-organise is a central challenge in the design of functional soft materials. Meeting this challenge requires the use of building blocks that interact with one another in a highly…
The depletion interaction mediated by non-adsorbing polymers promotes condensation and assembly of repulsive colloidal particles into diverse higher-order structures and materials. One example, with particularly rich emergent behaviors, is…
We investigate the self-assembly of amphiphilic nanocubes under rest and shear using molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and kinetic Monte Carlo (KMC) calculations. These particles combine both interaction and shape anisotropy, making them…
Building a general theoretical framework to describe the microscopic origin of macroscopic chirality in (colloidal) liquid crystals is a long-standing challenge. Here, we combine classical density functional theory with Monte Carlo…
The interplay between shape anisotropy and directed long-range interactions enables the self-assembly of complex colloidal structures. As a recent highlight, ellipsoidal particles polarized in an external electric field were observed to…
Anisotropy at the level of the inter-particle interaction provides the particles with specific instructions for the self-assembly of target structures. The ability to synthesize non-spherical colloids, together with the possibility of…
Cholesteric liquid crystals can exhibit spatial patterns in molecular alignment at interfaces that can be exploited for particle assembly. These patterns emerge from the competition between bulk and surface energies, tunable with the system…
The transfer of chirality across length-scales is an intriguing and universal natural phenomenon. However, connecting the properties of individual building blocks to the emergent features of their resulting large-scale structure remains a…
Complex colloidal cluster morphologies are desirable for the fabrication of advanced materials, such as photonic crystals and meta-materials, and can be formed through evaporation-driven packing. By coupling lattice Boltzmann and discrete…
Magnetic nanoparticles in a colloidal solution self-assemble in various aligned structures, which has a profound influence on the flow behavior. However, the precise role of the microstructure in the development of the rheological response…
We perform numerical simulations to study self-assembly of nanoparticles mediated by an elastic planar surface. We show how the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of these surfaces leads to anisotropic interactions between the…