Related papers: Cellular solid behaviour of liquid crystal colloid…
The interplay between crystal nucleation and the structure of the metastable fluid has been a topic of significant debate over recent years. In particular, it has been suggested that even in simple model systems such as hard or charged…
A simple model of an active colloid consisting of dumbbell-shaped particles that cyclically change their length without propelling themselves is proposed and analyzed. At nanoscales, it represents an idealization for bacterial cytoplasm or…
Colloidal systems offer the ideal conditions to study the nucleation process, both from an experimental viewpoint, due to their relative large size and long time-scales, and from a modeling point of view, due to the tunability of their…
Non-equilibrium transport of particles embedded in a liquid crystal host can, by cooling through a phase transition, be exploited to create a remarkable variety of structures including shells, foams, and gels. Due to the complexity of the…
One of the central experimental efforts in nematic colloids research aims to explore how the interplay between the geometry of particles along with the accompanying nematic director deformations and defects around them can provide a means…
The phase behaviour of colloidal dispersions is interesting for fundamental reasons and for technological applications such as photonic crystals and electronic paper. Sedimentation, which in everyday life is relevant from blood analysis to…
Living and engineered systems rely on the stable coexistence of two interspersed liquid phases. Yet surface tension drives their complete separation. Here we show that stable droplets of uniform and tuneable size can be produced through…
Ample experimental evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that the formation of monodispersed colloids proceeds through a more complex mechanism, than the generally excepted diffusional "burst nucleation" process. Instead, the…
We have studied the nucleation and the physical properties of a -1/2 wedge disclination line near the free surface of a confined nematic liquid crystal. The position of the disclination line has been related to the material parameters…
Many soft-matter and biophysical systems are composed of monomers which reversibly assemble into rod-like aggregates. The aggregates can then order into liquid-crystal phases if the density is high enough, and liquid-crystal ordering…
The study of liquid crystals at equilibrium has led to fundamental insights into the nature of ordered materials, as well as to practical applications such as display technologies. Active nematics are a fundamentally different class of…
The phase behavior is investigated for systems composed of a large number of macromolecular components N, with N greater or equal to 2. Liquid-liquid phase separation is modelled using a virial expansion up to the second order of the…
Sorting and separation of microparticles is a challenging problem of interdisciplinary nature. Existing technologies can differentiate microparticles by their bulk properties, such as size, density, electric polarizability, etc. The next…
The progress of realizing colloidal structures mimicking natural forms of organization in condensed matter is inherently limited by the availability of suitable colloidal building blocks. To enable new forms of crystalline and…
In this paper we present a detailed analytical study of the phase diagram and of the structural properties of a field theoretic model with a short-range attraction and a competing long-range screened repulsion. We provide a full derivation…
We investigate experimentally and numerically the defect configurations emerging when a cholesteric liquid crystal is confined to a spherical shell. We uncover a rich scenario of defect configurations, some of them non-existent in nematic…
Spontaneous onset of a low temperature topologically ordered phase in a 2-dimensional (2D) lattice model of uniaxial liquid crystal (LC) was debated extensively pointing to a suspected underlying mechanism affecting the RG flow near the…
We determine the full kinetic phase diagram for nucleation and growth of crystal phases in a suspension of charged colloids. We calculate nucleation barrier heights for face-centered cubic (fcc) and body-centered cubic (bcc) crystal phases…
We present further evidence that gelation is an arrested phase separation in attractive colloid-polymer mixtures, based on a method combining confocal microscopy experiments with numerical simulations recently established in {\bf Nature…
We demonstrate a variety of ordered patterns, including hexagonal structures and chains, formed by colloidal particles (droplets) at the free surface of a nematic liquid crystal (LC). The surface placement introduces a new type of particle…