ﻻ يوجد ملخص باللغة العربية
The effect of boundaries and how these can be used to influence the bulk behaviour in geometrically frustrated systems are both long-standing puzzles, often relegated to secondary role. Here we use numerical simulations and proof of concept experiments to demonstrate that boundaries can be engineered to control the bulk behavior in a colloidal artificial ice. We show that an antiferromagnetic frontier forces the system to rapidly reach the ground state (GS), as opposed to the commonly implemented open or periodic boundary conditions. We also show that strategically placing defects at the corners generates novel bistable states, or topological strings which result from competing GS regions in the bulk. Our results could be generalized to other frustrated micro and nanostructures where boundary conditions may be engineered with lithographic techniques.
Topological insulators insulate in the bulk but exhibit robust conducting edge states protected by the topology of the bulk material. Here, we design a colloidal topological insulator and demonstrate experimentally the occurrence of edge states in a
We use molecular dynamics computer simulations to investigate the relaxation dynamics of a simple model for a colloidal gel at a low volume fraction. We find that due to the presence of the open spanning network this dynamics shows at low temperature
We study the fluctuation-induced Casimir interactions in colloidal suspensions, especially between colloids immersed in a binary liquid close to its critical demixing point. To simulate these systems, we present a highly efficient cluster Monte Carlo
Thermally induced particle flow in a charged colloidal suspension is studied in a fluid-mechanical approach. The force density acting on the charged boundary layer is derived in detail. From Stokes equation with no-slip boundary conditions at the par
We investigate critical phenomena in colloids by means of the renormalization-group based hierarchical reference theory of fluids (HRT). We focus on three experimentally relevant model systems: namely, the Asakura-Oosawa model of a colloidal dispersi