Colloidal Crystallization: Real‐Time Monitoring of Colloidal Crystallization in Electrostatically‐Levitated Drops (Small 11/2020)

Colloidal epitaxy: playing with the boundary conditions of colloidal crystallization.

We have studied, with quantitative confocal microscopy, epitaxial colloidal crystal growth of particles interacting with an almost hard-sphere (HS) potential in a gravitational field and density matched colloids interacting with a long-range (LR) repulsive potential with a body-centred cubic (BCC) equilibrium crystal phase. We show that in both cases it is possible to grow thick, stacking fault...

Shape-sensitive crystallization in colloidal superball fluids.

Guiding the self-assembly of materials by controlling the shape of the individual particle constituents is a powerful approach to material design. We show that colloidal silica superballs crystallize into canted phases in the presence of depletants. Some of these phases are consistent with the so-called "Λ1" lattice that was recently predicted as the densest packing of superdisks. As the size o...

A Smoluchowski Model of Colloidal Crystallization Dynamics

1. Introduction Understanding concentrated colloidal dynamics in the presence of different pairwise interactions and external fields provides a basis to predict the temporal evolution of colloidal microstructures in diverse phenomena including suspension rheology and colloidal crystallization. However, a microscopic theory of concentrated colloidal dynamics does not yet exist that rigorously in...

Entropically driven colloidal crystallization on patterned surfaces

We investigate the self-assembly of colloidal spheres on periodically patterned templates. The surface potentials and the surface phases are induced entropically by the presence of dissolved, nonadsorbing polymers. A rich variety of two-dimensional fluidlike and solidlike phases was observed to form on template potentials with both one- and two-dimensional symmetry. The same methodology was the...

Non-classical pathways of crystallization in colloidal systems