Self-assembly of colloidal bands driven by a periodic external field

Phase Transitions of Oppositely Charged Colloidal Particles Driven by Alternating Current Electric Field

We study systems containing oppositely charged colloidal particles under applied alternating current electric fields (AC fields) using overdamped Langevin dynamics simulations in three dimensions. We obtain jammed bands perpendicular to the field direction under intermediate frequencies and lanes parallel with the field under low frequencies. These structures also depend upon the particle charges. The pathway for generating jammed bands follows a stepwise mechanism, and intermediate bands are observed during lane formation in some systems. We investigate the component of the pressure tensors in the direction parallel to the field and observe that the jammed to lane transition occurs at a critical value for this pressure. We also find that the stable steady states appear to satisfy the principle of maximum entropy production. Our results may help to improve the understand of the underlying mechanisms for these types of dynamic phase transitions and the subsequent cooperative assemblies of colloidal particles under such non-equilibrium conditions.

Ordering of binary colloidal crystals by random potentials

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 an 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.

Demixing of active particles in the presence of external fields

Self-propelled active particles are inherently out of equilibrium as they collect energy from their surroundings and transform it into directed motion. A recent theoretical study suggests that binary mixtures of active particles with distinct effective diffusion coefficients exhibit dynamical demixing when their diffusion coefficients differ by more than one order of magnitude. Here, we show that this difference may be reduced drastically in the presence of external fields even when the response to the field is the same for both species. We investigate this demixing as a function of the ratio of the diffusion coefficients and discuss the implications of the results for active systems.

Dynamic Design of Spatial Patterns of Colloidal Suspensions

We study the collective dynamics of colloidal suspensions in the presence of a time-dependent potential by means of dynamic density functional theory. We consider a nonlinear diffusion equation for the density and show that spatial patterns emerge from a sinusoidal external potential with a time-dependent wavelength. These patterns are characterized by a sinusoidal density with the average wavelength and a Bessel-function envelope with an induced wavelength that depends only on the amplitude of the temporal oscillations. As a generalization of this result, we propose a design strategy to obtain a family of spatial patterns using time-dependent potentials of practically arbitrary shape.