Related papers: Structure and Fragmentation in Colloidal Artificia…
Colloidal particles are considered ideal building blocks to produce materials with enhanced physical properties. The state-of-the-art techniques for synthesizing these particles provide control over shape, size, and directionality of the…
Confinement can have a considerable effect on the behavior of particle systems, and is therefore an effective way to discover new phenomena. A notable example is a system of identical bosons at low temperature under an external field…
The assembly of colloidal cubic diamond is a challenging process since the shape and interaction parameters and the thermodynamic conditions where this structure is stable are elusive. The simultaneous use of shape-anisotropic particles and…
Similarities between models of fragmenting nuclei and disordered systems in condensed matter suggest corresponding methods. Several theoretical models of fragmentation investigated in this fashion show marked differences, indicating…
Competing interactions stabilize exotic mesoscopic structures, yet the microscopic mechanisms by which they influence non-equilibrium processes leading to disordered states remain largely unexplored, despite their critical role in…
Thanks to a constant energy input, active matter can self-assemble into phases with complex architectures and functionalities such as living clusters that dynamically form, reshape and break-up, which are forbidden in equilibrium materials…
At sufficiently low temperatures and high densities, repulsive spherical particles in two-dimensions (2d) form close-packed structures with six-fold symmetry. By contrast, when the interparticle interaction has an attractive anisotropic…
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…
The role of saturation for cluster formation in finite systems such as atomic nuclei is analyzed by considering three length-scale ratios, and performing deformation-constrained self-consistent mean-field calculations. The effect of…
The emergence of structure through aggregation is a fascinating topic and of both fundamental and practical interest. Here we demonstrate that self-generated solvent flow can be used to generate long-range attractions on the colloidal…
Soft materials consist of basic units that are significantly larger than an atom but much smaller than the overall dimensions of the sample. The label "soft condensed matter" emphasizes that the large basic building blocks of these…
In this thesis we deal with the specific collective phenomena in condensed matter - striped-structures formation. Such structures are observed in different branches of condensed matter physics, like surface physics or physics of…
We combine experiments and numerical simulations to investigate the emergence of clogging in a system of interacting paramagnetic colloidal particles driven against a disordered landscape of larger obstacles. We consider a single aperture…
The dynamics of colloidal particles in potential energy landscapes have mainly been investigated theoretically. In contrast, here we discuss the experimental realization of potential energy landscapes with the help of light fields and the…
Structural defects are ubiquitous in condensed matter, and not always a nuisance. For example, they underlie phenomena such as Anderson localization and hyperuniformity, and they are now being exploited to engineer novel materials. Here, we…
Locally (re)structuring colloidal gels $\unicode{x2013}$ micron-sized particles forming a connected network with arrested dynamics $\unicode{x2013}$ enables precise tuning of the micromechanical and -rheological properties of the system. A…
Artificial soft matter systems have appeared as important tools to harness mechanical motion for microscale manipulation. Typically, this motion is driven either by the external fields or by mutual interaction between the colloids. In the…
We consider a theoretical model for a binary mixture of colloidal particles and spherical emulsion droplets. The hard sphere colloids interact via additional short-ranged attraction and long-ranged repulsion. The droplet-colloid interaction…
Systems of soft-core particles interacting via a two-scale potential are studied. The potential is responsible for peaks in the structure factor of the liquid state at two different but comparable length scales, and a similar bimodal…
Simulation results are presented on the collapse of granular columns composed of rod-like particles. Columns can be stable and free-standing if either the friction coefficient is large enough, or the rods long enough. Destabilizing…