Related papers: Colloidal stabilization via nanoparticle haloing
We study the phenomenon of self-assembly of silica micro-spheres on a glass plate during evaporation of the solvent from a colloidal suspension. Our experiments unveil an interesting competition between ordering and compaction in a strongly…
Gelation of colloidal nanocrystals (NCs) emerged as a strategy to preserve inherent nanoscale properties in multiscale architectures. Yet available gelation methods still struggle to reliably control nanoscale optical phenomena such as…
We investigate the non-equilibrium fluid structure mediated forces between two colloids driven through a suspension of mutually non-interacting Brownian particles as well as between a colloid and a wall in stationary situations. We solve…
We present fully ab-initio calculations of van der Waals coefficients for two different situations: i) the interaction between hydrogenated silicon clusters; and ii) the interactions between these nanostructures and a non metallic surface…
The simplicity of hard spheres as a model system is deceptive. Although the particles interact solely through volume exclusion, that nevertheless suffices for a wealth of static and dynamical phenomena to emerge, making the model an…
Nanocrystalline bulk materials are desirable for many applications as they combine mechanical strength and specific electronic transport properties. Our bottom up approach starts with tailored nanoparticles. Compaction and thermal treatment…
Strongly interacting binary mixtures of superparamagnetic colloidal particles confined to a two-dimensional water-air interface are examined by theory, computer simulation and experiment. The mixture exhibits a partial clustering in…
We describe arrangements of ions capable of producing short-range attractive interactions between pairs of charged colloidal spheres in the low temperature strongly correlated limit. For particles of radius $R$ with bare charge $Z$ and…
The structure of the transient layer at the interface between air and the aqueous solution of silica nanoparticles with the size distribution of particles that has been determined from small-angle scattering has been studied by the X-ray…
The effect of silica nanoparticles on transient microemulsion networks made of microemulsion droplets and telechelic copolymer molecules in water is studied, as a function of droplet size and concentration, amount of copolymer, and…
Past experimental observations of gas-liquid and gas-crystal coexistence in low-salinity suspensions of highly charged colloids have suggested the existence of like charge attraction. Evidence for this phenomenon was also observed in…
We present a numerical study on geometric percolation in liquid dispersions of hard slender colloidal particles subjected to an external orienting field. In the formulation and liquid-state processing of nanocomposite materials, the…
The binodals and the non-ergodicity lines of a binary mixture of hard sphere-like particles with large size ratio are computed for studying the interplay between dynamic arrest and phase separation in depletion-driven colloidal mixtures.…
We study the effects of colloidal nanoparticles (NPs) in liquid crystal samples in the dilute limit, in a Landau--de Gennes theoretical framework. The effects of the suspended NPs are captured by a homogenized energy, as outlined…
The Bernal-Fowler ice rules stipulate that each water molecule in an ice crystal should form four hydrogen bonds. However, in extreme or constrained conditions, the arrangement of water molecules deviates from conventional ice rules,…
To prevent the flocculation and phase separation of nanoparticles in solution, nanoparticles are often functionalized with short chain surfactants. Here we present fully-atomistic molecular dynamics simulations which characterize how these…
At low temperatures, colloidal particles with short-range attractive and long-range repulsive interactions can form various periodic microphases in bulk.In this paper, we investigate the self-assembly behaviour of colloids with competing…
The contact mechanics of individual, very small particles with other particles and walls is studied using a nanoindenter setup that allows normal and lateral displacement control and measurement of the respective forces. The sliding,…
Monte Carlo simulations of the colloidal epitaxy of hard spheres (HSs) on a square pattern have been performed. This is an extension of previous simulations; we observed a shrinking intrinsic stacking fault running in an oblique direction…
We propose coating spherical particles or droplets with anisotropic nano-sized objects to allow micron-scale colloids to link or functionalize with a four-fold valence, similar to the sp3 hybridized chemical bonds associated with, e.g.,…