Related papers: Structure and Fragmentation in Colloidal Artificia…
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 design of complex materials and the formation of specific patterns often arise from the properties of the individual building blocks. In this respect, colloidal systems offer a unique opportunity because nowadays they can be synthesized…
Colloidal systems present exciting opportunities to study clusters. Unlike atomic clusters, which are frequently produced at extremely low density, colloidal clusters may interact with one another. Here we consider the effect of such…
Manipulating the way in which colloidal particles self-organise is a central challenge in the design of functional soft materials. Meeting this challenge requires the use of building blocks that interact with one another in a highly…
Colloidal gels are prime examples of functional materials exhibiting disordered, amorphous, yet meta-stable forms. They maintain stability through short-range attractive forces and their material properties are tunable by external forces.…
Recent studies aimed at investigating artificial analogs of bacterial colonies have shown that low-density suspensions of self-propelled particles confined in two dimensions can assemble into finite aggregates that merge and split, but have…
The formation of colloidal gels is strongly dependent on the volume fraction of the system and the strength of the interactions between the colloids. Here we explore very dilute solutions by the means of numerical simulations, and show…
Extreme deformation of soft matter is central to our understanding of the effects of shock, fracture, and phase change in a variety of systems. Yet, despite, the increasing interest in this area, far-from-equilibrium behaviours of soft…
Colloids are abundant in nature, science and technology, with examples ranging from milk to quantum dots and the "colloidal atom" paradigm. Similarly, liquid crystal ordering is important in contexts ranging from biological membranes to…
We examine binary mixtures of superparamagnetic colloidal particles confined to a two-dimensional water-air interface both by real-space experiments and Monte-Carlo computer simulations at high coupling strength. In the simulations, the…
Soft materials, such as colloidal suspensions, polymer solutions, and biological systems, are typically multicomponent mixtures of macromolecules and simpler components (e.g., microions, monomers, solvent) that can assemble into complex…
The competition of depletion attractions and longer-ranged repulsions between colloidal particles in colloid-polymer mixtures leads to the formation of heterogeneous gel-like structures. For instance, gel networks, i.e., states where the…
We investigate the behavior of a mixture of asymmetric colloidal dumbbells and emulsion droplets by means of kinetic Monte Carlo simulations. The evaporation of the droplets and the competition between droplet-colloid attraction and…
A simple three-dimensional model of a fluid whose constituent particles interact via a short range attractive and long range repulsive potential is used to model the aggregation into large spherical-like clusters made up of hundreds of…
Active fluids generate spontaneous, often chaotic mesoscale flows. Harnessing these flows to drive embedded soft materials into structures with controlled length scales and lifetimes is a key challenge at the interface between the fields of…
Active matter exhibits striking behaviour reminiscent of living matter and molecular fluids, and has promising applications in drug delivery or mixing at the micron scale. Active colloidal systems provide important models with simple and…
Recent theoretical studies have predicted a new clustering mechanism for soft matter particles that interact via a certain kind of purely repulsive, bounded potentials. At sufficiently high densities, clusters of overlapping particles are…
Magic numbers in finite particle systems correspond to specific system sizes that allow configurations with low free energy, often exhibiting closed surface shells to maximize the number of nearest neighbors. Since their discovery in atomic…
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…
We study experimentally what is arguably the simplest yet non-trivial colloidal system: two-dimensional clusters of 6 spherical particles bound by depletion interactions. These clusters have multiple, degenerate ground states whose…