Self-assembly of anisotropic colloidal building blocks via critical Casimir forces (B07)

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project utilizes curvature dependent critical Casimir forces for long range particle interactions towards their self-assembly. First, the crystallization of attractive elliptical particles will be studied in-depth. First experiments indicated the particular importance of curvature-dependent critical Casimir forces, an aspect which has neither been experimentally nor theoretically addressed so far. Second, the mechanical properties of suspensions of hard silica rods will be measured using a recently developed scheme, which employs an active probe particle whose rotational diffusion coefficient is rather sensitive to the structural properties of the environment.