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Active solids emerge from self-actuating components interacting with each other to form crystalline patterns. In equilibrium, commensurability underpins our understanding of nanoscale friction and particle-level dynamics of crystals.…
Solidification is an important process in many alloy processing routes. The solidified microstructure of alloys is usually made up of dendrites, eutectics or a combination of both. The evolving morphologies are largely determined by the…
From hydrogels and plastics to liquid crystals, soft solids cover a wide array of synthetic and biological materials that play key enabling roles in advanced technologies such as 3D printing, soft robotics, wearable electronics,…
Freestanding tubular crystals offer a general description of crystalline order on deformable surfaces with cylindrical topology, such as single-walled carbon nanotubes, microtubules, and recently reported colloidal assemblies. These systems…
When a system undergoes a transition from a liquid to a solid phase, it passes through multiple intermediate structures before reaching the final state. However, our knowledge on the exact pathways of this process is limited, mainly due to…
Customarily, crystalline solids are defined to be {\em rigid} since they resist changes of shape determined by their boundaries. However, rigid solids cannot exist in the thermodynamic limit where boundaries become irrelevant. Particles in…
We present a dynamical model of crystal growth, in which it is possible to reliably achieve asymmetric products, beginning from symmetric initial conditions and growing within an isotropic environment. The asymmetric growth is the result of…
Solids deform and fluids flow, but soft glassy materials, such as emulsions, foams, suspensions, and pastes, exhibit an intricate mix of solid and liquid-like behavior. While much progress has been made to understand their elastic (small…
There is mounting evidence indicating that relaxation dynamics in liquids approaching their glass transition not only becomes increasingly cooperative (1,2) but the relaxing regions also become more compact in shape(3-7). While the surface…
We present a confocal-microscopy study of demixing and remixing in binary liquids containing colloidal particles. First, particle-stabilized emulsions have been fabricated by nucleation and growth of droplets upon cooling from the…
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…
Whereas disclination defects are energetically prohibitive in two-dimensional flat crystals, their existence is necessary in crystals with spherical topology, such as viral capsids, colloidosomes or fullerenes. Such a geometrical…
We report, for the first time, some experimental observations regarding a new type of long range interaction between rigid particles that prevails when they are suspended in an soft elastic gel. A denser particle submerges itself to a…
Polymer blends offer an exciting material for various potential applications due to their tunable properties by varying constituting components and their relative composition. Our simulation results unravel an intrinsic relationship between…
Our previous molecular dynamic simulation studies of simple two-dimensional (2D) systems \cite{matt_big} suggested that both geometrical defects (localized, large-amplitude deviations from hexagonal ordering) and topological defects…
Fluidisation is the process by which the weight of a bed of particles is supported by a gas flow passing through it from below. When fluidised materials flow down an incline, the dynamics of the motion differ from their non-fluidised…
Topological spin textures emerging in magnetic materials usually appear in crystalline states. A long-standing dilemma is whether we should understand these emergent crystals as gathering particles or coupling waves, the answer of which…
Conventional vapor deposition or epitaxial growth of two-dimensional (2D) materials and heterostructures is conducted in a large chamber in which masses transport from the source to the substrate. Here we report a chamber-free, on-chip…
Two-dimensional (2D) particulate aggregates formed due to competing interactions exhibit a range of non-equilibrium steady state morphologies from finite-size compact crystalline structures to non-compact string-like conformations. We…
Curved particles have been shown to stabilize a range of states with unique order in dense suspensions of colloidal bent core liquid crystals. The shape of the colloidal rods encourages the formation of curved director fields. However,…