Related papers: Gating and tunable confinement of active colloids …

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.…

Designing microscopic and nanoscopic self-propelled particles and characterising their motion has become a major scientific challenge over the past decades. To this purpose, phoretic effects, namely propulsion mechanisms relying on local…

The appealing feature of molecular electronics is the possibility of exploiting functionality built within a single molecule. This functionality can be employed, for example, for sensing or switching purposes. Thus, ideally, the associated…

Patchy colloidal model with three and four equivalent patches, confined in the attractive random porous media, undergo re-entrant gas-liquid phase separation with the possibility for the liquid phase density to approach zero. This unusual…

Inverse patchy colloids are nano- to micro-scale particles with a surface divided into differently charged regions. This class of colloids combines directional, selective bonding with a relatively simple particle design: owing to the…

Active matter physics and swarm robotics have provided powerful tools for the study and control of ensembles driven by internal sources. At the macroscale, controlling swarms typically utilizes significant memory, processing power, and…

We theoretically and numerically investigate the transport of active colloids to target regions, delimited by asymmetric energy barriers. We show that it is possible to introduce a generalized effective temperature that is related to the…

Process of quantum tunneling of particles in various physical systems can be effectively controlled even by a weak and slow varying in time electromagnetic signal if to adapt specially its shape to a particular system. During an…

Limited bonding valence, usually accompanied by well-defined directional interactions and selective bonding mechanisms, is nowadays considered among the key ingredients to create complex structures with tailored properties: even though…

In this paper, we develop a large-$N$ field theory for a system of $N$ classical particles in one dimension at thermal equilibrium. The particles are confined by an arbitrary external potential, $V_\text{ex} (x)$, and repel each other via a…

An extremely broad and important class of phenomena in nature involves the settling and aggregation of matter under gravitation in fluid systems. Some examples include: sedimenting marine snow particles in lakes and oceans (central to…

The ability to control the location of nanoscale objects in liquids is essential for fundamental and applied research from nanofluidics to molecular biology. To overcome their random Brownian motion, the electrostatic fluidic trap creates…

We study the active dynamics of self-propelled asymmetrical colloidal particles (Janus particles) fueled by an AC electric field. Both the speed and the direction of the self-propulsion and the strength of attractive interaction between the…

We show how including attraction in interparticle interactions reverses the effect of fluctuations in ordering of a prototypical artificial frustrated system. Buckled colloidal monolayers exhibit the same ground state as the Ising…

Entropic forces in colloidal suspensions and in polymer-colloid systems are of long-standing and continuing interest. Experiments show how entropic forces can be used to control the self-assembly of colloidal particles. Significant advances…

Rotational excitation of polar molecules trapped in an optical lattice gives rise to rotational excitons. Here we show that non-linear interactions of such excitons can be controlled by an electric field. The exciton--exciton interactions…

For collections of particles in a thermal bath interacting with an asymmetric substrate, it is possible for a ratchet effect to occur where the particles undergo a net dc motion in response to an ac forcing. Ratchet effects have been…

Isolating neutral and charged particles from the environment is essential in precision experiments. For decades, this has been achieved by trapping ions with radio-frequency (rf) fields and neutral particles with optical fields. Recently,…

Active colloids and externally actuated semi-flexible filaments provide basic building blocks for designing autonomously motile micro-machines. Here, we show that a passive semi-flexible filament can be actuated and transported by attaching…

Recent studies on confined crystals of charged colloidal particles are reviewed, both in equilibrium and out of equilibrium. We focus in particular on direct comparisons of experiments (light scattering and microscopy) with lattice sum…