Controlled Multistep Self-Assembling of Colloidal Droplets at a Nematic Liquid Crystal-Air Interface.

We present a controlled cascade of self-assemblings of colloidal droplets at a nematic liquid crystal-air interface into large-scale ordered structures. Changing the tilt of the droplet-induced elastic dipoles via its dependence on the nematic film thickness, we are able to control the dipole-dipole interaction and thus the self-assembling regime. For a progressively large tilt, droplets form anisotropic lattices, which then transform into arrays of repulsive chains, then to bands of half-period-shifted densely bound chains. These structures with chain order at the inner scale aggregate into different large-scale clusters that have a pronounced circular pattern and are stabilized by the many-body elastocapillary attraction.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Physical Review Letters

• Publication date

  2019-08-22

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Materials Science, Physics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.087801PMID 31491225
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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