Our joint work with Nicolas Vogel and Erdmann Spiecker advanced the understanding of the structure, defect accumulation and thermodynamics of colloidal clusters on and off magic numbers and was awarded this month’s cover for ACS Nano. Congratulations Junwei and Chrameh!…
Category: Publication
Fractional crystallization of hard spheres
Fractional crystallization is crystal formation out of chemical mixtures or solutions. In this process, the growing crystal typically has a different composition than the fluid. This makes fractional crystallization an important method for separating or purifying substances based on differences…
Exp-Ana-Sim collaboration on magic clusters
In a joint collaboration combining experiment (synthesis and self-assembly), analysis (electron microscopy including tomography), and simulation (molecular dynamics and free energy calculations), a team from FAU involving Junwei Wang and Chrameh Mbah reported magic number colloidal clusters: “Clusters in systems…
Milestone paper
A paper involving Michael Engel with coauthors Joshua Anderson and Sharon Glotzer from University of Michigan, Masaharu Isobe from Nagoya Institute of Technology, Etienne Bernard then from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Werner Krauth from École Normale Supérieure has been…
Controlling nanocrystal shapes
In a recent ACS Nano publication, Alberto Leonardi proposes an etching synthesis method for controlling the shape of core-shell nanocrystals: “The application of nanocrystals as heterogeneous catalysts and plasmonic nanoparticles requires fine control of their shape and chemical composition. A…
Dancing robots
A publication with experiments by Christian Scholz, then a postdoc at MSS and now at Universität Düsseldorf, appeared in Nature Communications: “Biological organisms and artificial active particles self-organize into swarms and patterns. Open questions concern the design of emergent phenomena…
New paper: “Band gap formation and Anderson localization”
A research collaboration with Uni Fribourg (Switzerland) lead to a joint publication in PNAS: “It has been shown recently that disordered dielectrics can support a photonic band gap in the presence of structural correlations. This finding is surprising, because light…
Paper on DNA-programmable self-assembly published in ‚Science‘
A research collaboration involving Michael Engel reported the self-assembly of gold nanoparticles of a particular shape with DNA ligands into clathrate colloidal crystals. The work required a combined effort of state-of-the-art synthesis techniques and DEM computer simulations. Clathrate Colloidal Crystals…
Two high-impact publications
We are very excited about two new nanoparticle publications in top-level journals, a review article on self-assembly in Chemical Reviews and an upcoming paper about quasicrystals in Nature Materials: “Chemical methods developed over the past two decades enable preparation of…
Photonic band gap paper appears in PRL
“We study photonic band gap formation in two-dimensional high-refractive-index disordered materials where the dielectric structure is derived from packing disks in real and reciprocal space. Numerical calculations of the photonic density of states demonstrate the presence of a band gap…
