These posts relate work by myself and/or close colleagues.
Congratulations to Philipp Schönhöfer, now Dr Schönhöfer, for completing an excellent computational PhD thesis on the self-assembly of pear-shaped colloid particles, now fully published! Read more
Well done, Tobias Hain, for the publication of your first research paper. A lovely piece of simulation work, carried out together with Jacob Kirkensgaard, on geometric mechanisms at play when copolymers self-organise on a spherical substrate. Not only did the pretty pictures tickle the interest of Softmatter’s front page department, but the message resonated with a member of the public… Read more
Animation file: (Nature Comms Suppl Info page) Read more
… over Gyroids. Philipp Schönhöfer has completed a nice piece of work to extend on the pear-shaped particle simulations that we have been doing in collaboration with Doug Cleaver and Matthieu Marechal. Previously we had simulated a system of nearly hard pear-shaped particles and found that they form the Gyroid geometry. Now, it turns out that the addition of a small number of spherical particles leads to the formation of the double diamond phase, at least in relatively small simulation boxes.
Since the award of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics for “theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter”, topological effects are all the hype in condensed matter physics. In a new paper “Bragg-mirror-like circular dichroism in bio-inspired quadruple-gyroid 4srs nanostructures“, just published by the Nature Group journal Light: Science & Applications, we describe the experimental realisation of a photonic material that owes its amazing optical properties to a topological effect.
The Bulletin of the German mathematical association ‘Mitteilungen der DMV’ has published an overview piece ‘In a material world: Hyperbolische Geometrie in biologischen Materialien’ by Myfanwy Evans and myself, describing the role of negatively curved interfaces, three-periodic nets and weavings, and more complicated entangled structures. Read more
In a totally different context to the original quote and article, Phil Anderson’s quote “More is different” holds also for the chiro-optical response of gyroid-based photonic materials. Eight intergrown Gyroids give a substantially different chiro-optical response than the single gyroid. The group theoretic prediction from Matthias Saba’s PhD work (Saba et al, PRB 2013) has now been experimentally validated by Nanofabrication experiments in the Center for Microphotonics at Swinburne University (Turella et al, Optics Letters, 2015). Read more