Related papers: Shape Selection in Chiral Self-Assembly

Polar active particles constitute a wide class of synthetic colloids that are able to propel along a preferential direction, given by their polar axis. Here, we demonstrate a generic self-phoretic mechanism that leads to their spontaneous…

Cholesteric liquid crystals can exhibit spatial patterns in molecular alignment at interfaces that can be exploited for particle assembly. These patterns emerge from the competition between bulk and surface energies, tunable with the system…

We carry out Monte Carlo simulations to investigate the effect of molecular shape on liquid-crystal order. In our approach, each model mesogen consists of several soft spheres bonded rigidly together. The arrangement of the spheres may be…

Structural modification of adsorbed overlayers by means of external factors is an important objective in the fabrication of stimuli-responsive materials with adjustable physicochemical properties. In this contribution we present a…

We consider a model of colloidal spherical particles carrying a permanent dipole moment which is laterally shifted out of the particles' geometrical centres, i.e. the dipole vector is oriented perpendicular to the radius vector of the…

Deformations of heavy elastic cylinders with their axis in the direction of earth's gravity field are investigated. The specimens, made of polyacrylamide hydrogels, are attached from their top circular cross section to a rigid plate. An…

Motivated to understand the behavior of biological filaments interacting with membranes of various types, we study a theoretical model for the shape and thermodynamics of intrinsically-helical filaments bound to curved membranes. We show…

Particles in the shape of chiral dipoles show a preferential rotation in three dimensional homogeneous isotropic turbulence. A chiral dipole consists of a rod with two helices of opposite handedness, one at each end. We can use 3d printing…

The unique topology and physics of chiral superlattices make their self-assembly from nanoparticles a holy grail for (meta)materials. Here we show that tetrahedral gold nanoparticles can spontaneously transform from a perovskite-like…

Intracellular organelles are subject to a steady flux of lipids and proteins through active, energy consuming transport processes. Active fission and fusion are promoted by GTPases, e.g., Arf-Coatamer and the Rab-Snare complexes, which both…

We study the periodic buckling patterns that emerge when elastic shells are subjected to geometric confinement. Residual swelling provides access to range of shapes (saddles, rolled sheets, cylinders, and spherical sections) which vary in…

We systematically explore the self-assembly of semi-flexible polymers in deformable spherical confinement across a wide regime of chain stiffness, contour lengths and packing fractions by means of coarse-grained molecular dynamics…

Bicontinuous Pickering emulsions (bijels) are a physically interesting class of soft materials with many potential applications including catalysis, microfluidics and tissue engineering. They are created by arresting the spinodal…

In this paper, we discuss microscopic models for chiral active particles, i.e., rotating active units that exhibit circular or spinning motion. While non-chiral active particles are typically governed by self-propulsion and conservative…

Chiral crystals consisting of micro-helices have many optical properties while presently available fabrication processes limit their large-scale applications in photonic devices. Here, by using a simplified simulation method, we investigate…

We carry out Monte Carlo simulations on fluid membranes with orientational order and multiple edges in the presence and absence of external forces. The membrane resists bending and has an edge tension, the orientational order couples with…

In simple fluids, such as water, invariance under parity and time-reversal symmetry imposes that the rotation of constituent 'atoms' are determined by the flow and that viscous stresses damp motion. Activation of the rotational degrees of…

We show that chiral symmetry can be broken spontaneously in one-component systems with isotropic interactions, i.e. many-particle systems having maximal a priori symmetry. This is achieved by designing isotropic potentials that lead to…

Contacts between particles in dense, sheared suspensions are believed to underpin much of their rheology. Roughness and adhesion are known to constrain the relative motion of particles, and thus globally affect the shear response, but an…

Anisotropic colloidal particles have the ability to self-assemble into cholesteric structures. We used molecular dynamics to simulate the self-assembly of ellipsoidal particles with the objective to establish a general framework to reveal…