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The physical gelation of colloids produces elastic structures that are commonly used to stabilize complex fluids in multiple industries. However, the ability to control the level of elastic modulus of these materials is limited by the…
A critical advantage of electrostatic assemblies over covalent and crystalline bound materials is that associated structures can be disassembled into their original constituents. Nanoscale devices designed for the controlled release of…
A minimalist simulation model for lipid bilayers is presented. Each lipid is represented by a flexible chain of beads in implicit solvent. The hydrophobic effect is mimicked through an intermolecular pair potential localized at the…
Two-dimensional microparticle crystals can be formed in the sheath of a gas discharge plasma. Ions from the bulk plasma are accelerated in the sheath electric field, flowing past the grains to create a positive ion wake downstream from the…
Self-propulsion and navigation due to the sensing of environmental conditions - such as durotaxis and chemotaxis - are remarkable properties of biological cells that cannot be reproduced by single-component self-propelled particles. We…
We propose a new mechanism to create self-assembled porous media with highly tunable geometrical properties and permeabilities: We first allow a particle-stabilized emulsion to form from a mixture of two fluids and colloidal particles.…
Geometric frustration offers a pathway to soft matter self-assembly with controllable finite sizes. While the understanding of frustration in soft matter assembly derives almost exclusively from continuum elastic descriptions, a current…
Biological cells self-organize into living materials that uniquely blend structure with functionality and responsiveness to the environment. The integration of similar life-like features in man-made materials remains challenging, yet…
Self-assembly processes provide the means to achieve scalable and versatile metamaterials by "bottom-up" fabrication. Despite their enormous potential, especially as a platform for energy materials, self-assembled metamaterials are often…
Liquid shells (e.g. double emulsions, vesicles etc.) are susceptible to interfacial instability and rupturing when driven out of mechanical equilibrium. This poses a significant challenge for the design of liquid shell based micro-machines,…
An increasing variety of crystal structures has been observed in soft condensed matter over the past two decades, surpassing most expectations for the diversity of arrangements accessible through classical driving forces. Here, we survey…
A mesoscopic theory for water-in-salt electrolytes combining density functional and field-theoretic methods is developed in order to explain the unexpectedly large period of the oscillatory decay of the disjoining pressure observed in…
Just like atoms combine into molecules, colloids can self-organize into predetermined structures according to a set of design principles. Controlling valence -- the number of inter-particle bonds -- is a prerequisite for the assembly of…
We synthesize thermoresponsive poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) colloidal microgel particles of different stiffnesses by controlling the concentration of crosslinker in a one-pot synthesis method. We employ oscillatory rheology and…
One of the challenges of self-assembling finite-sized colloidal aggregates with a sought morphology is the necessity of precisely sorting the position of the colloids at the microscopic scale to avoid the formation of off-target structures.…
Flow-Induced Self-Assembly (FISA) is the phenomena of particle chaining in viscoelastic fluids while experiencing shear flow. FISA has a large number of applications across many fields including material science, food processing and…
Many biological materials must couple mechanical strength with the ability to rapidly self-assemble at a specific location. In particular, biomolecular condensates readily self-assemble via phase separation, but may also need to resist…
Sophorolipids are well-known scaled-up microbial glycolipid biosurfactants with a strong potential for commercialization due to their biological origin and mildness in contact with the skin and the environment compared to classical…
The interaction between a flexible polymer in good solvent and smaller associating solute molecules such as amphiphiles (surfactants) is considered theoretically. Attractive correlations, induced in the polymer because of the interaction,…
We present a numerical study of dense colloidal suspensions in pressure-driven microchannel flow in two dimensions. The colloids are modeled as elastic and frictional spheres suspended in a Newtonian fluid, which we simulate using the…