Self-assembly of various building blocks has been considered as a powerful approach to
generate novel materials with tailorable structures and optimal properties. Understanding …

Biological liquid crystals, a rich set of soft materials with rod‐like structures widely existing in
nature, possess typical lyotropic liquid crystalline phase properties both in vitro (eg …

Assembling colloidal particles using site-selective directional interactions into
predetermined colloidal superlattices with desired properties is broadly sought after, but …

Predicting the macroscopic chiral behaviour of liquid crystals from the microscopic chirality
of the particles is highly non-trivial, even when the chiral interactions are purely entropic in …

Establishing precise control over the shape and the interactions of the microscopic building
blocks is essential for design of macroscopic soft materials with novel structural, optical and …

Since Onsager's seminal work, hard rods have been taken as a prototype of nematic liquid
crystals, characterized by uniaxial order and a uniform director field as a ground state. Here …

This paper reviews 'entropic patchiness' of colloidal particles. On the one hand this may be
due to their intrinsic tendency to form certain shape-dependent configurations in crowded …

Dynamic interplay between extracellular matrix with anisotropic structure and biological cells
has directed the scaffold path of development toward the utilization of actuation-responsive …

Monodisperse rod-like colloidal particles are known for spontaneously forming both nematic
and smectic liquid crystal phases, but their self-assembly was typically exploited from the …

In the presence of a nonadsorbing polymer, monodisperse rod-like particles assemble into
colloidal membranes, which are one-rod-length–thick liquid-like monolayers of aligned rods …