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Droplet-based microfluidics has emerged as a powerful technology for the miniaturization and automation of biochemical assays. The replacement of surfactants by nanoparticles as interfacial stabilizers has gained increasing interest.…
Fast and programmable transport of liquid droplets on a solid substrate is desirable in microfluidic, thermal, biomedical, and energy devices. Past research has focused on designing substrates with asymmetric structures or gradient…
Ultrasound-vaporizable microdroplets can be exploited for targeted drug delivery. However, it requires customized microfluidic techniques able to produce monodisperse, capillary-sized and biocompatible multiple emulsions. Recent development…
Fluorinated surfactants are widely utilized in various applications, including firefighting foams, coatings, and lubricants. Their wide utility is due to their unique properties, such as their ability to effectively lower…
Coalescence of micrometer-scale droplets is impacted by several parameters, including droplet size, viscosities of the two phases, droplet velocity and angle of approach, as well as interfacial tension and surfactant coverage. The dynamics…
Active emulsions can spontaneously form self-propelled droplets or phoretic micropumps. It has been predicted that the interaction with their self-generated chemical fields can lead to multistable higher-order flows and chemodynamic…
We present Tuna-step, a novel microfluidic module based on step emulsification that allows for reliable generation of droplets of different sizes. Until now, sizes of droplets generated with step emulsification were hard-wired into the…
Periodic assemblies of nanoparticles are central to surface patterning, with applications in biosensing, energy conversion, and nanofabrication. Evaporation of colloidal droplets on substrates provides a simple yet effective route to…
Block copolymers often create droplets when placed on a substrate. Such nanostructured droplets can be arranged into regular microstructured arrays, thereby forming hierarchically organized materials that can be used in microelectronics,…
The design of strategies to generate efficient mixing is crucial for a variety of applications, particularly digital microfluidic devices that use small "discrete" fluid volumes (droplets) as fluid carriers and microreactors. In recent…
Surfactants are often used to stabilise two-dimensional (2D) materials in environmentally friendly solvents such as water. Aqueous-surfactant solutions prevent agglomeration of nanosheets through steric and electrostatic repulsion,…
Numerous cell-types have shown a remarkable ability to detect and move along gradients in stiffness of an underlying substrate -- a process known as durotaxis. The mechanisms underlying durotaxis are still unresolved, but generally believed…
Chemical surfactants are omnipresent in consumers' products but they suffer from environmental concerns. For this reason, complete replacement of petrochemical surfactants by biosurfactants constitute a holy grail but this is far from…
Self-assembled nano and micro-structures, particularly those capable of responsive erasure and regeneration, have garnered significant interest for their applications in smart photonics and electronics. However, current techniques for…
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…
Tunable composite materials with interesting physical behavior can be designed through integrating unique optical properties of solid nanostructures with the facile responses of soft matter to weak external stimuli, but this approach…
We present a paradigm in constructing very stable, faceted nanotube and fullerene structures by laterally joining nanoribbons or patches of different planar phosphorene phases. Our ab initio density functional calculations indicate that…
We reveal an unreported physical mechanism that enables the pre-concentration, sorting and characterization of charged polystyrene nanobeads and liposomes dispersed in a continuous flow within a straight micron-sized channel. Initially, a…
Complex fluids such as emulsions, colloidal gels, polymer or surfactant solutions are all characterized by the existence of a "microstructure" which may couple to an external flow on timescales that are easily probed in experiments. Such a…
We have developed an original setup using microfluidic tools allowing one to produce continuously monodisperse microreactors ($\approx 100$ nL), and to control their temperatures as they flow in the microdevice. With a specific…