Janus and patchy particles have designed heterogeneous surfaces that consist of two or several patches with different materials properties. These particles are emerging as building blocks for a new class of soft matter and functional materials. Here we introduce a route for forming heterogeneous capsules by producing highly ordered jammed colloidal shells of various shapes with domains of contr...

The development in the synthesis and self-assembly of patchy nanoparticles has resulted in the creation of complex hierarchical structures. Co-assembly of polymeric nanoparticles and protein molecules combines the advantages of polymeric materials and biomolecules, and will produce new functional materials. Co-assembly of positively charged patchy micelles and negatively charged bovine serum al...

Manipulation of particles at the surface of a droplet can lead to the formation of structures with heterogeneous surfaces, including patchy colloidal capsules or patchy particles. Here, we study the assembly and rearrangement of microparticles confined at the surface of oil droplets. These processes are driven by electric-field-induced hydrodynamic flows and by 'electro-shaking' the colloidal p...

The term “data surveying” refers to the preliminary examination of a dataset to assess its overall character, and this process typically involves simple descriptive statistics to characterize the available variables, along with detection of data anomalies (e.g., outliers or incomplete records) and possibly other “interesting” or “unusual” features that may be worthy of careful scrutiny. In the ...

Molecular simulations are performed to study the self-assembly of particles with discrete, attractive interaction sites - "patches" - at prescribed locations on the particle surface. Chains, sheets, rings, icosahedra, square pyramids, tetrahedra, and twisted and staircase structures are obtained through suitable design of the surface pattern of patches. Our simulations predict that the spontane...

This paper is concerned with the stability of the set of trajectories of a patchy vector field, in the presence of impulsive perturbations. Patchy vector fields are discontinuous, piecewise smooth vector fields that were introduced in Ancona and Bressan (1999) to study feedback stabilization problems. For patchy vector fields in the plane, with polygonal patches in generic position, we show tha...

We investigate the effects of patchy (clustered) connectivity in sparsely connected attractor neural networks (NNs). This study is motivated by the fact that the connectivity of pyramidal neurons in layer II/III of the mammalian visual cortex is patchy and sparse. The storage capacity of hypercolumnar attractor NNs that use the Hopfield and Willshaw learning rules with this kind of connectivity...

The landscapes currently studied in ecology are either " discontinuous " (category-based or patch-based), as in the case of mosaics of agricultural units, or of more " continuous " type (raster lattices), as used for representing elevation or other ecological gradients. The main landscape models either involve explicit processes or are neutral, recreating spatial patterns in the absence of stud...

Ecosystems are vulnerable to large areas of rocky desertification, which results in patchy soils and stone-inlaid soils. Karst landforms typically characterized by heterogeneous phosphorus (P) distributions at high calcium (Ca), but root foraging behavior has not been fully documented agronomical plants. In this study, Bidens pilosa L. Plantago asiatica were raised pots a simulated soil environ...