Related papers: Electrostatic Self-assembly : A New Route Towards …

Motivated by the idea of using simple macroscopic examples to illustrate the physics of complex systems, we modify a historic experimental setup in which interacting floating magnets spontaneously self-assemble into ordered clusters. By…

The presence of nanoparticles in a diblock copolymer leads to changes in the morphology and properties of the matrix and can produce highly organized hybrid materials. The resulting material properties depend not only on the polymer…

Materials where the electron filling is close to commensurate filling provide one of the great challenges in materials science. Several proposals of unconventional orderings, where the electronic liquid self-organizes into components with…

We consider the complexation of highly charged semiflexible polyelectrolytes with oppositely charged macroions. On the basis of scaling arguments we discuss how the resulting complexes depend on the persistence length of the…

Multilevel self-assembly involving small structured groups of nano-particles provides new routes to development of functional materials with a sophisticated architecture. Apart from the inter-particle forces, the geometrical shapes and…

One emerging approach for the fabrication of complex architectures on the nanoscale is to utilize particles customized to intrinsically self-assemble into a desired structure. Inverse methods of statistical mechanics have proven…

Colloidal building blocks with re-configurable shapes and dynamic interactions can exhibit unusual self-assembly behaviors and pathways. In this work, we consider the phase behavior of colloids coated with surface-mobile polymer brushes…

We study both experimentally and theoretically the self-assembly of binary block copolymers in dilute solution, where self-assembly is triggered by changing the solvent from the common good solvent THF to the selective solvent water, and…

Light-activated self-propelled colloids are synthesized and their active motion is studied using optical microscopy. We propose a versatile route using different photoactive materials, and demonstrate a multiwavelength activation and…

Monopole-like electrostatic interactions are ubiquitous in biology and condensed matter, but they are often screened by counter-ions and cannot be switched from attractive to repulsive. In colloidal science, where the prime goal is to…

We study self-assembly in suspensions of supracolloidal polymer-like structures made of crosslinked magnetic particles. Inspired by self-assembly motifs observed for dipolar hard spheres, we focus on four different topologies of the…

We systematically investigate the self-assembly of anisotropic cone-shaped particles decorated by ring-like attractive patches. We demonstrate that the self-assembled clusters, which arise due to the conical particle's anisotropic shape…

Nanoscopic heterogeneities in composition and structure are quintessential for the properties of electrocatalyst materials. Here, we present a semiclassical model to study the electrochemical properties of supported electrocatalyst…

Colloidal molecules are designed to mimic their molecular analogues through their anisotropic shape and interactions. However, current experimental realizations are missing the structural flexibility present in real molecules thereby…

Mutually repelling particles form spontaneously ordered clusters when forced into confinement. The clusters may adopt similar spatial arrangements even if the underlying particle interactions are contrastingly different. Here we demonstrate…

The complexation of oppositely charged colloidal objects is considered in this paper as a thermodynamic micellization process where each kind of object needs the others to micellize. This requirement gives rise to quantitatively different…

In many biopolymer solutions, attractive interactions that stabilize finite-sized clusters at low concentrations also promote phase separation at high concentrations. Here we study a model biopolymer system that exhibits the opposite…

Nanoparticles with "sticky patches" have long been proposed as building blocks for the self-assembly of complex structures. The synthetic realizability of such patchy particles, however, greatly lags behind predictions of patterns they…

Emergent behaviors occur in a vast array of systems across many scales, and are of fundamental physical importance because of the intrinsic difficulty in linking microscopic system properties to macroscopic behaviors. Here we study the…

Room-temperature Coulomb blockade of charge transport through composite nanostructures containing organic inter-links has recently been observed. A pronounced charging effect in combination with the softness of the molecular links implies…