A simple and versatile method for making chemically patterned anisotropic colloidal particles is proposed and demonstrated for two different types of patterning. Using a combination of thermo/mechanical stretching followed by a wet chemical treatment of a sterically stabilized latex, both patchy ellipsoidal particles with sticky interactions near the tips as well as particles with tunable fluor...

solar cells, [ 4 ] and photonic crystals, [ 5 ] 2D hexagonal structures and 3D inverted opal (IO) structures have recently been intensively studied. In order to fabricate uniform IO structures consisting of regular arrangements of spherical void spaces surrounded by solid walls, 2D and 3D colloidal crystals consisting of a regular arrangement of uniform spherical particles are required. To date...

Colloidal particles in a liquid medium are transported with constant velocity, and dynamic light scattering experiments are performed on the samples by self-mixing laser Doppler velocimetry. The power spectrum of the modulated wave induced by the motion of the colloidal particles cannot be described by the well-known formula for flowing Brownian motion systems, i.e., a combination of Doppler sh...

The electrostatic interaction between colloidal particles trapped at the interface between two immiscible electrolyte solutions is studied in the limit of small inter-particle distances. Within an appropriate model analytic expressions for the electrostatic potential as well as for the surface and line interaction energies are obtained. They demonstrate that the widely used superposition approx...

The dynamics of a glass-forming material slow greatly near the glass transition, and molecular motion becomes inhibited. We use confocal microscopy to investigate the motion of colloidal particles near the colloidal glass transition. As the concentration in a dense colloidal suspension is increased, particles become confined in transient cages formed by their neighbors. This prevents them from ...

The advent of nanotechnology has facilitated the preparation of colloidal particles with adjustable sizes and the control of their size-dependent properties. Physical manipulation, such as separation, mixing, and concentration, of these colloidal particles represents an essential step for fully utilizing their potential in a wide spectrum of nanotechnology applications. In this study, we invest...

Colloids are important for our daily life and modern technologies. Among which the colloidal particles with anisotropic properties in geometry, surface functionality, and chemical composition emerge as an important family of the colloidal genome. Scientifically, the inand out-of-equilibrium behavior of anisotropic colloids are fundamentally different from conventional particles because of their...

We use substrates chemically micropatterned with anionic and cationic regions to govern the deposition of charged colloidal particles. The direct observation of the colloidal assembly suggests that this process includes two steps: an initial patterned attachment of colloids to the substrate and an additional ordering of the structure upon drying. The driving forces of the process, i.e. , screen...

The distance-resolved effective interaction between two colloidal particles in a subcritical solvent is explored both by an explicit and implicit modeling. An implicit solvent approach based on a simple thermodynamic interface model is tested against grand-canonical Monte Carlo computer simulations using explicit Lennard-Jones solvent molecules. Close to liquid-gas coexistence, a joint gas bubb...

Hydrophobic poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) colloidal particles, when dispersed in oil with a relatively high dielectric constant, can become highly charged. In the presence of an interface with a conducting aqueous phase, image-charge effects lead to strong binding of colloidal particles to the interface, even though the particles are wetted very little by the aqueous phase. We study both the...