Colloids
An important class of soft matter is given by colloidal suspensions, or colloids. These fascinating systems can have quite unique properties, often a highly non-Newtonian flow behavior which can give rise to very unintuitive dynamic response. On the microscopic scale the defining characteristic of colloids is that they consist of particles, droplets or bubbles (together constituting the disperse phase) of a size that is substantially larger than the molecules of the continuous phase in which the disperse phase constituents are suspended. In our everyday life we frequently encounter colloids, for instance in milk (an emulsion of oil in water), foams (air bubbles in a liquid or solid continuous phase), gels (forming when the disperse phase particles connect into networks that extend throughout the macroscopic system) and smoke (particles or droplets in a gaseous continuous phase). And we are actually relying on colloidal suspensions for our life functions, with blood being a very important multi-component colloidal suspension (blood cells suspended in blood plasma).
In the ESMP group research, colloids play key roles in several ways. Lyotropic liquid crystals, studied per se and used frequently as templates in our work, are in themselves colloids par excellence, and we often study suspensions of nanoparticles as well as emulsions of liquid crystals in isotropic continuous phases.
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Three most recent publications
Isotropic-isotropic phase separation and spinodal decomposition in liquid crystal-solvent mixtures, Catherine G. Reyes, Jörg Baller, Takeaki Araki and Jan P. F. Lagerwall , soft matter, 2019,15, 6044-6054
Liquid crystal elastomer shell actuators with negative order parameter, V. S. R. Jampani, R. H. Volpe, K. Reguengo de Sousa, J. Ferreira Machado, C. M. Yakacki and J. P. F. Lagerwall, Sci.adv.,DOI 10.1126/sciadv.aaw2476
Influence of head group and chain length of surfactants using for stabilising liquid crystal shells,
Anjali Sharma and J.P.F. Lagerwall,
Liquid crystals, DOI 10.1080/02678292.2018.1509391More publications can be found here.