Colloids articles within Nature Materials

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Active and stable catalysts to accelerate the transition from fossil fuel to renewable feedstocks, reduce energy consumption and minimize environmental footprints are needed. Electrocatalysts based on copper nanocrystals encapsulated in hybrid alumina shells stable against structural reconstruction during CO2 electroreduction are reported.

    • Petru P. Albertini
    • , Mark A. Newton
    •  & Raffaella Buonsanti

  • Comment |

    Soft matter has evolved considerably since it became recognized as a unified field. This has been driven by new experimental, numerical and theoretical methods to probe soft matter, and by new ways of formulating soft materials. These advances have driven a revolution in knowledge and expansion into biological and active matter.

    • David A. Weitz

  • Article |

    The large-scale fabrication of cellulose nanocrystal photonic films in a roll-to-roll device is achieved by careful optimization of the cellulose nanocrystal formulation and its controlled deposition and drying on a substrate. Once dry, these photonic films can be peeled and milled into effect pigments, highlighting the potential of cellulose nanocrystals as a sustainable material for industrial photonic applications.

    • Benjamin E. Droguet
    • , Hsin-Ling Liang
    •  & Silvia Vignolini

  • Article |

    Charged colloidal systems undergo fast crystallization under deep supercooling due to a coupled mechanism involving the discrete advancement of the crystal growth front and defect repair inside the recently formed solid phase.

    • Qiong Gao
    • , Jingdong Ai
    •  & Peng Tan

  • Article |

    Hierarchically structured 3D materials made of distinct colloidal particles spontaneously assemble by combining the electrostatic modulation of particle interactions to form supracolloids that are organized into 3D structures on solvent drying in an entropy-driven process.

    • Mohammad-Amin Moradi
    • , E. Deniz Eren
    •  & Joseph P. Patterson

  • News & Views |

    Colloidal structures and lattices made of patchy particles with chemically distinct lobes are formed by exploring site-specific depletion forces. This approach introduces a simple route to assemble colloidal superlattices.

    • Bas G. P. van Ravensteijn
    • , Patrick A. Hage
    •  & Ilja K. Voets

  • News & Views |

    Magnetite crystals form by the aggregation and subsequent merger of crystalline precursors, which can be interpreted in terms of colloidal assembly.

    • Jeffrey D. Rimer

  • Article |

    The progressive stiffening of the solid–solid contacts that freeze dense colloidal suspensions are shown to cause the macroscopic ageing of such materials.

    • Francesco Bonacci
    • , Xavier Chateau
    •  & Anaël Lemaître

  • News & Views |

    Polymer precipitation under turbulent flow is used for the high-throughput synthesis of soft microparticles with fractal coronas that display significant adhesive properties.

    • Theodore Hueckel
    •  & Stefano Sacanna

  • News & Views |

    Shape-directed assembly of engineered microparticles enables multicomponent machines that can reconfigure dynamically to control their field-driven locomotion.

    • Kyle J. M. Bishop

  • Letter |

    The kinetics and thermodynamics of the nucleation of magnetite crystals from primary particles are shown to be described by colloidal assembly theory, allowing for predictions of crystal sizes to be made.

    • Giulia Mirabello
    • , Alessandro Ianiro
    •  & Nico A. J. M. Sommerdijk

  • Article |

    The rotational dynamics of self-propelled microparticles suspended in a colloidal glass is sharply increased at the glass transition of the system while their translation diffusion is strongly hindered.

    • Celia Lozano
    • , Juan Ruben Gomez-Solano
    •  & Clemens Bechinger

  • Article |

    Mobile micromachines with advanced configurations and functions self-assembled through designed dielectrophoretic interactions between structural and motor units.

    • Yunus Alapan
    • , Berk Yigit
    •  & Metin Sitti

  • Letter |

    Dense suspensions of hard particles readily display discontinuous shear thickening under shear but not reversible shear jamming. Here it is shown that the formation of interparticle hydrogen bonds is crucial for the shear jamming of these suspensions.

    • Nicole M. James
    • , Endao Han
    •  & Heinrich M. Jaeger

  • News & Views |

    The chirality of colloids dispersed in achiral liquid crystals shapes colloidal dynamics and interactions, giving rise to chiral supramolecular assemblies and attractive or repulsive colloidal motions.

    • Karthik Nayani
    • , Young-Ki Kim
    •  & Nicholas L. Abbott

  • Article |

    Colloidal chiral springs and helices are formed by light inside a nematic liquid crystal suspension, predefining the mesoscopic superstructures self-assembled in such systems.

    • Ye Yuan
    • , Angel Martinez
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • Letter |

    A two-dimensional quasicrystalline tiling based on the bronze-mean hexagonal pattern is proposed.

    • Tomonari Dotera
    • , Shinichi Bekku
    •  & Primož Ziherl

  • Article |

    Viscoelastic phase separation of colloidal suspensions can be interrupted to form gels either by glass transition or crystallization. A kinetic pathway to spontaneously form network or porous structures made of metallic and semiconducting crystals is proposed.

    • Hideyo Tsurusawa
    • , John Russo
    •  & Hajime Tanaka

  • Article |

    Complex colloidal crystal structures can be obtained by a combination of preassembled units and DNA-mediated interactions. This enables, for instance, the generation of a MgCu2 structure with interpenetrating diamond and pyrochlore sublattices.

    • Étienne Ducrot
    • , Mingxin He
    •  & David J. Pine

  • News & Views |

    Confocal microscopy and computational analysis, now used for measuring microscale stresses in colloidal crystals, could be developed for investigation of amorphous materials, crystal melting, and mechanical properties of tissues.

    • Mark Bowick
    •  & Paul Chaikin

  • News & Views |

    Self-propelled Janus particles with externally regulated anisotropic interactions can be made to swarm, cluster and form slithering chains.

    • Roberto Di Leonardo

  • Letter |

    Metal–dielectric Janus colloids subjected to perpendicular a.c. electric fields can self-organize into swarms, chains, clusters and isotropic gases, depending on the frequency of the field.

    • Jing Yan
    • , Ming Han
    •  & Steve Granick

  • News & Views |

    A colloidal particle straddling an air/water interface experiences an unexpectedly large viscous drag.

    • Vinothan N. Manoharan

  • Letter |

    Soft filamentous bundles, including F-actin, microtubules or bacterial flagella, can experience large frictional forces that scale logarithmically with sliding velocity, and such frictional coupling can be tuned by modifying lateral interfilament interactions.

    • Andrew Ward
    • , Feodor Hilitski
    •  & Zvonimir Dogic

  • Editorial |

    Model colloidal systems are a testbed for understanding aspects of the organization of matter.

  • News & Views |

    Temperature can switch the thermodynamic phase of colloid–polymer mixtures by tipping the balance between competing attractive interactions induced by polymer depletion or adsorption.

    • Ah-Young Jee
    • , Boyce Tsang
    •  & Steve Granick

  • News & Views |

    Janus ellipsoids self-assemble into self-limiting fibres that can be reversibly actuated by applying an electric field.

    • Eric M. Furst

  • News & Views |

    The nucleation of a crystal within another can involve intermediate liquid nuclei.

    • Eduardo Sanz
    •  & Chantal Valeriani

  • Commentary |

    Understanding entropic contributions to common ordering transitions is essential for the design of self-assembling systems with addressable complexity.

    • Daan Frenkel

  • Commentary |

    Two conceptual strategies for encoding information into self-assembling building blocks highlight opportunities and challenges in the realization of programmable colloidal nanostructures.

    • Ludovico Cademartiri
    •  & Kyle J. M. Bishop

  • Article |

    Single-particle-resolution video microscopy of films of colloidal particles shows that solid–solid transitions between square and triangular lattices occur through a two-step nucleation mechanism that involves liquid nuclei.

    • Yi Peng
    • , Feng Wang
    •  & Yilong Han

  • News & Views |

    Knot-shaped micrometric tubes embedded in a liquid crystal induce the formation of defect lines that loop around the knotted tubes to form knots.

    • William T. M. Irvine
    •  & Dustin Kleckner

  • Letter |

    Colloidal particles dispersed in liquid crystals induce nematic fields and topological defects that are dictated by the topology of the colloidal particles. However, little is known about such interplay of topologies. It is now shown that knot-shaped microparticles in liquid crystals induce defect lines that get entangled with the colloidal knots, and that such mutually tangled configurations satisfy topological constraints and follow predictions from knot theory.

    • Angel Martinez
    • , Miha Ravnik
    •  & Ivan I. Smalyukh

  • News & Views |

    Planar patterns of colloidal microparticles have been manufactured with high yield over square centimetre areas by using magnetic-field microgradients in a paramagnetic fluid. This approach could evolve into technology capable of printing three-dimensional objects through programmable and reconfigurable 'magnetic pixels'.

    • Changqian Yu
    • , Jie Zhang
    •  & Steve Granick

  • News & Views |

    Open crystalline configurations self-assembled from colloids with sticky patches have recently been shown to be unexpectedly stable. A theory that accounts for the entropy of the colloids' thermal fluctuations now explains why.

    • Michael E. Cates

  • Letter |

    The design of open crystalline arrangements of colloidal particles with attractive patches has been hampered by the difficulty in exploring the full range of conceivable parameters both experimentally or with simulations. An analytical theory that explains the role of entropy in stabilizing open colloidal lattices and that predicts the conditions at which stable crystal structures of patchy particles form is now reported.

    • Xiaoming Mao
    • , Qian Chen
    •  & Steve Granick

  • News & Views |

    The assembly of hundreds of thousands of semiconductor nanorods into nearly spherical or needle-like colloidal superparticles made of highly ordered supercrystalline domains can be explained by simple thermodynamic and kinetic principles.

    • Uri Banin
    •  & Amit Sitt

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