Related papers: Composite colloidal assembly by critical Casimir f…
The Casimir interaction is induced by electromagnetic fluctuations between objects and it is strongly dependent upon the electronic and optical properties of the materials making up the objects. Here we investigate this ubiquitous…
We consider a near-critical binary mixture with addition of antagonistic salt confined between weakly charged and selective surfaces. A mesoscopic functional for this system is developed from a microscopic description by a systematic…
We present a detailed study of the kinetic cluster growth process during gelation of weakly attractive colloidal particles by means of experiments on critical Casimir attractive colloidal systems, simulations and analytical theory. In the…
We study the finite temperature Casimir interaction between two concentric cylinders. When the separation between the cylinders is much smaller than the radii of the cylinders, the asymptotic expansions of the Casimir interaction are…
We study numerically the critical behavior of a modified, active Asakura-Oosawa model for colloid-polymer mixtures. The colloids are modeled as self-propelled particles with Vicsek-like interactions. This system undergoes phase separation…
A binary colloidal mixture of unequal sizes, subjected to an external potential barrier, has been investigated using canonical ensemble molecular dynamics simulations. The attractive depletion interaction between the external barrier and…
Population heterogeneity is ubiquitous among active living systems, but little is known about its role in determining their spatial organization and large-scale dynamics. Combining evidence from synthetic active fluids assembled from…
The possibility to induce demixing in a colloidal mixture by adding small polymers, or other equivalent depletant agents, is theoretically investigated. By use of Mean Field Theory, suitably generalized to deal with short range effective…
Using quasi-exact numerical density-matrix renormalization-group techniques we calculate the critical Casimir force for a two-dimensional (2D) Ising strip with equal strong surface fields, along the thermodynamic paths corresponding to the…
We propose the dynamical Casimir effect in a time-modulated near-field system at finite temperatures. The system consists of two bodies made of polaritonic materials, that are brought in close proximity to each other, and the modulation…
We investigate the finite-temperature phase diagram of polar molecules confined in a quasi-two-dimensional geometry by a harmonic potential along the polarization axis. We employ Quantum Monte Carlo simulations to explore the strongly…
Molecular dynamics simulations are used to demonstrate that a binary solvent can be used to stratify colloidal mixtures when the suspension is rapidly dried. The solvent consists of two components, one more volatile than the other. When…
We extensively investigated the critical behavior of mixtures of colloids and polymers via the two-component Asakura-Oosawa model and its reduction to a one-component colloidal fluid using accurate theoretical and simulation techniques. In…
We investigate the influence of confinement on phase separation in colloid-polymer mixtures. To describe the particle interactions, the colloid-polymer model of Asakura and Oosawa [J. Chem. Phys. 22, 1255 (1954)] is used. Grand canonical…
In this article, we demonstrate a method for inducing reversible crystal-to-crystal transitions in binary mixtures of soft colloidal particles. Through a controlled decrease of salinity and increasingly dominating electrostatic…
Breakthrough experiments have newly explored the fascinating physics of dipolar quantum droplets and supersolids. The recent realization of dipolar mixtures opens further intriguing possibilities. We show that under rather general…
For the first time we present analytical results for the contribution of electromagnetic fluctuations into thermodynamic properties of modulated systems, like cholesteric or smectic liquid crystalline films. In the case of small dielectric…
In a recent Letter [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 156101 (2009)], we presented experiments on critical Casimir induced colloidal aggregation in a system with negligibly small van der Waals forces. We presented a simple model based on a competition…
I show that cooperative exclusion processes with selective kinetic constraints exhibit fluctuation-induced forces that can be attractive or repulsive, depending on the density of boundary reservoirs, when their density-dependent diffusion…
Casimir forces in quantum electrodynamics emerge between microscopic metallic objects because of the confinement of the vacuum electromagnetic fluctuations occurring even at zero temperature. Their generalization at finite temperature and…