Computational studies of 3D self-assembly of nematic colloids

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Nematic colloids are a hybrid soft-matter system consisting of colloidal particles dispersed in a nematic liquid-crystalline host. Colloidal inclusions, which locally perturb nematic ordering, induce energetically unfavourable distortions and topological defects in the nematic medium. The system's drive to minimise free energy via the sharing of costly distortions endow the colloidal particles with highly anisotropic, elasticity-mediated interactions, which can be described in terms of a multipole expansion. In recent years, nematic colloids have emerged as an attractive class of building blocks for colloidal self-assembly with a rich playground for topological design, promising to extend the well-established `colloidal atom' paradigm.Despite this promise, studies of self-assembly of nematic colloids have largely focused on realising crystal structures in 2D, and a little is known about their phase behaviour in 3D. To address this knowledge gap, we have developed a computational framework for predicting crystal structures for spherical nematic colloids and studying their phase behaviour in 3D, using an effective pair potential that draws contributions from screened electrostatic repulsion and elasticity-mediated interactions under the multipolar approximation. The thesis will describe the development of this computational framework and present case studies to report novel phase behaviour as the effective pair potential is tuned. In certain cases, insight into how the crystal structures are self-assembled will be presented.