Soft Matters: Carving non-equilibrium pathways to control self-assembly
Date
Monday, February 10, 2020 09:00 - 10:00
Speaker
Jeremie Palacci (UC San Diego)
Location
Mondi Seminar Room 2, Central Building
Series
Seminar/Talk
Tags
Physical Sciences Seminar
Host
Scott Waitukaitis
Contact
Active particles are microscopic particles, which can inject energy locally and were made available by recent progress in colloidal science. They are ideal "pump-probes" to explore the emergent properties in soft systems powered from within or control and direct self-assembly at the microscale.
In this talk, I will first show how active particles added to a material can regulate its activity internally and boost the annealing of a colloidal monolayer [1]. It opens a broad range of novel opportunities to thermal treatments, where the properties of matter are not controlled macroscopically but microscopically and in real time by active dopants.
Next, I will introduce a new type of self-assembly through a novel approach to devise spinning microrotors that self-assemble and synchronize, from a single type of building block a colloid that self-propels. Using photo-active particles and light patterns, I will demonstrate the potential of non-equilibrium (phoretic) interactions to program self-assembly and control dynamical colloidal architectures [2]. It shows that, as in living systems, non-equilibrium processes hold the key to the realization of synthetic machines from machines.