Related papers: Biomolecular crystallization in microfluidic devic…
Nucleation, the birth of a stable cluster from disorder, is inherently stochastic. Yet up to date, there are no quantitative studies on NaCl nucleation that accounts for its stochastic nature. Here, we report the first stochastic treatment…
Experiments and simulations are used to study the kinetics of crystal growth in a mixture of magnetic and nonmagnetic particles suspended in ferrofluid. The growth process is quantified using both a bond order parameter and a mean domain…
In this paper we present a comprehensive study of the step-emulsification process for high-throughput production of (sub-)$\mu$m-size monodisperse droplets. The microfluidic device combines a Hele-Shaw nanofluidic cell with a step-like…
Nucleation and growth (N&G) - the emergence of a new phase within an initially homogeneous one - is one of the most important physical phenomena by which gas-liquid, liquid-liquid and solid-liquid phase separation takes place. Accordingly,…
Micro/nanoporous membranes have been used extensively in biological and medical applications associated with filtration, particle sorting, cell separation, and real-time sensing. Expanding its applications to microfluidics offers several…
Colloidal model systems allow studying crystallization kinetics under fairly ideal conditions with rather well characterized pair interactions and minimized external influences. In complementary approaches therefore experiment, analytic…
Recently, it was shown that a theoretical description of nucleation based on fluctuating hydrodynamics and classical density functional theory can be used to determine non-classical nucleation pathways for crystallization (Lutsko, Sci. Adv.…
We use dedicated microfluidic devices to expose soft hydrogel particles to a rapid change in the externally applied osmotic pressure and observe a non-monotonic response: After an initial rapid compression the particle slowly reswells to…
We engineered a microfluidic platform to study the effects of bioactive glass nanoparticles (BGNs) on cell viability under static culture. We incorporated different concentrations of BGNs (1%, 2%, and 3% w/v) in collagen hydrogel (with a…
Hyperpolarized nuclear magnetic resonance and lab-on-a-chip microfluidics are two dynamic, but until recently quite distinct, fields of research. Recent developments in both areas increased their synergistic overlap. By microfluidic…
Nanostructured materials formed via kinetically controlled self-assembly processes gather more interest nowadays. Bicontinuous emulsion gels stabilized by colloidal particles, called bijels, are attractive materials in soft-matter as they…
Ultrasound-driven microbubbles rectify oscillatory motion into strong steady streaming flow [1, 2]. In this fluid dynamics video, we show size-dependent trapping, focusing and sorting of microparticles, utilizing the interaction between…
With exquisite precision and reproducibility, cells orchestrate the cooperative action of thousands of nanometer-sized molecular motors to carry out mechanical tasks at much larger length scales, such as cell motility, division and…
Encapsulation of chemicals using polymer membranes enables to control their transport and delivery for applications such as agrochemistry or detergency. To rationalize the design of polymer capsules, it is necessary to understand how the…
One of most intriguing problems of heterogeneous crystal nucleation in droplets is its strong enhancement in the contact mode (when the foreign particle is presumably in some kind of contact with the droplet surface) compared to the…
In recent years significant attention has been attracted to proposals which utilize DNA for nanotechnological applications. Potential applications of these ideas range from the programmable self-assembly of colloidal crystals, to biosensors…
Because final properties of nanoscale polymeric structures are largely determined by the solid-state microstructure of the confined polymer, it is imperative not only to understand how the microstructure of polymers develops under nanoscale…
Ensemble averaging experiments may conceal many fundamental molecular interactions. To overcome that, a high-throughput detection of single molecules or colloidal nanodots is crucial for biomedical, nanoelectronic, and solid-state…
Induction time, a measure of how long one will wait for nucleation to occur, is an important parameter in quantifying nucleation kinetics and its underlying mechanisms. Due to the stochastic nature of nucleation, efficient methods for…
Optofluidic devices have revolutionized the manipulation and transportation of fluid at smaller length scales ranging from micrometers to millimeters. We describe a dedicated optical setup for studying laser-induced cavitation inside a…