Chains of cubic colloids at fluid–fluid interfaces

Abstract

Inspired by recent experimental observations of spontaneous chain formation of cubic particles adsorbed at a fluid-fluid interface, we theoretically investigate whether capillary interactions can be responsible for this self-assembly process....

Effect of gravity on the orientation and detachment of cubic particles adsorbed at soap film or liquid interfaces

“…This hexapolar deformation drives multiple cubes to self-assemble into hexagonal or graphenelike honeycomb lattices [23]. The orientation of the particles at the interface as a function of the packing, confinement and shape has attracted many studies [22,25,24,26,27,28].…”

Function Follows Form

“…Our results extend the knowledge of self-assembly at fluid-fluid interfaces that has been established for spheres [116,145,146], rods [30,31,33,122,124,126,149] and to some extent, cubes [32,128,129,131] by considering a more anisotropic, non-convex particle shape. We establish many similarities to the self-assembly of spheres and rods and cubes, but also a number of differences.…”

“…Similar to rods, however, the use of "simple" polar multipoles is insufficient to describe the capillary deformations and interactions, as it fails to capture the stretching of the deformation field caused by the elongated particle shape. In contrast to spheres and rods, but similar to cubes [129], (meta)stable configurations play a crucial role in the self-assembly. Both in the experiments and in our simulations we find particles adsorbed in both the vertical and horizontal adsorption modes, with substantially different capillary interactions.…”

“…The quadrupolar deformation of the interface found for spheres is also found for rods, but the elongated particle shape introduces additional anisotropy that significantly influences the self-assembly. More recent studies have also investigated faceted polyhedral particle shapes: cubes [32,119,[127][128][129], octahedra [130] and rhombicuboctahedra [131], to name a few. These cubelike particles display both a quadrupolar or a hexapolar deformation depending on specific system parameters.…”

Dynamics of Colloidal Cubes and Cuboids in Cylindrical Nanopores

“…In case of nanopore-confined colloids, these deviations are especially significant when the size of the suspended particles or macromolecules is comparable to the size of the hosting nanopore. Experimental [1][2][3][4][5] , theoretical [6][7][8][9][10][11] and simulation [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] studies on confined colloidal suspensions have shown the existence of a rich realm of nanostructures that are not observed in the bulk. Additionally, depending on the adhesive interactions established between the fluid and the pore walls and their relevance with respect to the cohesive interactions between fluid particles, several new phenomena, such as wetting, capillary condensation and evaporation, layering, anchoring, are detected [22][23][24][25][26][27] .…”