Self-organisation is driven by the interactions between the individual components of a system mediated by the environment, and is one of the most important strategies used by many biological systems to develop complex and functional structures. Furthermore, biologicallyinspired self-organisation offers opportunities to develop the next generation of materials and devices for electronics, photonics and nanotechnology. In this work, we demonstrate experimentally that a system of Janus particles (silica microspheres half-coated with gold) aggregates into clusters in the presence of a Gaussian optical potential and disaggregates when the optical potential is switched off. We show that the underlying mechanism is the existence of a hydrodynamic flow induced by a temperature gradient generated by the light absorption at the metallic patches on the Janus particles. We also perform simulations, which agree well with the experiments and whose results permit us to clarify the underlying mechanism. The possibility of hydrodynamic-flux-induced reversible clustering may have applications in the fields of drug delivery, cargo transport, bioremediation and biopatterning.
Structural defects are ubiquitous in condensed matter, and not always a nuisance. For example, they underlie phenomena such as Anderson localization and hyperuniformity, and they are now being exploited to engineer novel materials. Here, we show experimentally that the density of structural defects in a 2D binary colloidal crystal can be engineered with a random potential. We generate the random potential using an optical speckle pattern, whose induced forces act strongly on one species of particles (strong particles) and weakly on the other (weak particles). Thus, the strong particles are more attracted to the randomly distributed local minima of the optical potential, leaving a trail of defects in the crystalline structure of the colloidal crystal. While, as expected, the crystalline ordering initially decreases with increasing fraction of strong particles, the crystalline order is surprisingly recovered for sufficiently large fractions. We confirm our experimental results with particle-based simulations, which permit us to elucidate how this non-monotonic behavior results from the competition between the particle-potential and particle-particle interactions.Perfect crystalline structures are not commonly found in Nature, because, even in the absence of impurities, structural defects occur spontaneously and disrupt the periodicity of the crystalline lattice [1]. For example, when a melt is cooled down, multiple crystallites grow with degenerate orientations [2]. Since the coarsening time of these crystallites diverges with size, structural defects appear and prevent the emergence of global order [3,4]. While the existence of these defects is a challenge when growing single crystals, it can also be an opportunity when engineering the properties of materials; FIG. 1. Colloidal crystals with tunable degree of disorder. Final configurations obtained in (a-c) experiments and (d-f) simulations, for different molar fractions χ of strong particles. The weak (silica) particles are light gray, and the strong (polystyrene) particles are dark gray.indeed, control over defects enables the development of solid-state devices with fine-tuned mechanical resilience, optical properties, and heat and electrical conductivity [5][6][7][8][9]. In atomic crystals, engineering structural defects is an experimental challenge for two reasons [10]: first, current visualization techniques at the atomic scale do not provide a high spatial or time resolution [11,12]; second, no current technique can control the density of defects in a systematic manner [13]. The first challenge can be overcome studying colloidal crystals as models for atomic systems [14,15], where colloidal particles can be individually tracked using standard digital video microscopy techniques [16][17][18]. Here, we demonstrate that the second challenge can be solved combining a binary colloidal mixture and an optical random potential generated by a speckle light pattern. This permits us to control the density of structural defects in the resulting 2D colloidal crystal and ...
Hydrodynamic fluxes generated by Janus particles in an optical potential drive reversible clustering of colloids.
Self-organisation is driven by the interactions between the individual components of a system mediated by the environment, and is one of the most important strategies used by many biological systems to develop complex and functional structures. Furthermore, biologically-inspired self-organisation offers opportunities to develop the next generation of materials and devices for electronics, photonics and nanotechnology. In this work, we demonstrate experimentally that a system of Janus particles (silica microspheres half-coated with gold) aggregates into clusters in the presence of a Gaussian optical potential and disaggregates when the optical potential is switched off. We show that the underlying mechanism is the existence of a hydrodynamic flow induced by a temperature gradient generated by the light absorption at the metallic patches on the Janus particles. We also perform simulations, which agree well with the experiments and whose results permit us to clarify the underlying mechanism. The possibility of hydrodynamic-flux-induced reversible clustering may have applications in the fields of drug delivery, cargo transport, bioremediation and biopatterning.
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