相关论文: Colloidal Joints with Designed Motion Range and Tu…

Development of artificial materials exhibiting unusual optical properties is one of the major strands of current photonics research. Of particular interest are soft-matter systems reconfigurable by external stimuli that play an important…

Combining topology and plasmonics paradigms in nanocolloidal systems may enable new means of pre-engineering desired composite material properties. Here we design and realize orientationally ordered assemblies of noble metal nanoparticles…

Colloids play an important role in fundamental science as well as in nature and technology. They have had a strong impact on the fundamental understanding of statistical physics. For example, colloids have helped to obtain a better…

The assembly of colloids in nematic liquid crystals via topological defects has been extensively studied for spherical particles, and investigations of other colloid shapes have revealed a wide array of new assembly behaviors. We show,…

One of the frontiers of nanotechnology is advancing beyond the periodic self-assembly of materials. Icosahedral quasicrystals, aperiodic in all directions, represent one of the most challenging targets that have yet to be experimentally…

The progress of realizing colloidal structures mimicking natural forms of organization in condensed matter is inherently limited by the availability of suitable colloidal building blocks. To enable new forms of crystalline and…

We describe opportunities and challenges with wireless robotic materials. Robotic materials are multi-functional composites that tightly integrate sensing, actuation, computation and communication to create smart composites that can sense…

Colloids that interact via a short-range attraction serve as the primary building blocks for a broad range of self-assembled materials. However, one of the well-known drawbacks to this strategy is that these building blocks rapidly and…

Self-assembly processes allow us to design and create complex nanostructures using molecules as building blocks and surfaces as scaffolds. This autonomous driven construction is possible due to a complex thermodynamic balance of…

Patchy colloidal platelets with convex, non-spherical shapes have been realized with different materials at length scales ranging from nanometers to microns. While the assembly of these hard shapes tends to maximize edge-to-edge contacts,…

We study theoretically a binary system in which an attraction of unlike particles is combined with a type-independent soft core repulsion. The possible experimental implementation of the system is a mixture of DNA-covered colloids, in which…

Colloidal quantum dots (cQDs) recently emerged as building blocks for semiconductor materials with tuneable properties. Electro-hydrodynamic printing can be used to obtain sub-micrometre patterns of cQDs without elaborate and aggressive…

We induce and investigate the coarsening and melting dynamics of an initially static nanoparticle colloidal monolayer at an ionic liquid-vacuum interface, driven by a focused, scanning electron beam. Coarsening occurs through grain…

A heterogeneous and dilute suspension of catalytically active colloids is studied as a non-equilibrium analogue of ionic systems, which has the remarkable feature of action-reaction symmetry breaking. Symmetrically coated colloids are found…

Moving a module in a modular robot is a very complex and error-prone process. Unlike in swarm, in the modular robots we are targeting, the moving module must keep the connection to, at least, one other module. In order to miniaturize each…

The complex interactions underlying collective motion in biological systems give rise to emergent behaviours such as flocking, sorting, and cooperative transport. These dynamics often involve species with different motilities coordinating…

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…

Controlling the motion of nano and microscale objects in a fluid environment is a key factor in designing optimized tiny machines that perform mechanical tasks such as transport of drugs or genetic material in cells, fluid mixing to…

Colloids that attractively bond to only a few neighbors (e.g., patchy particles) can form equilibrium gels with distinctive dynamic properties that are stable in time. Here, we use a coarse-grained model to explore the dynamics of linked…

One of the fundamental goals of nanotechnology is to exploit selective and directional interactions between molecules to design particles that self-assemble into desired structures, from capsids, to nano-clusters, to fully formed crystals…