Soft Matter and Complex Systems Seminar

Systems with competing interactions are widespread in nature. Mixtures of surfactants, lipids, diblock copolymers, colloids are examples of such systems. They are important in biology and in industry. It has been demonstrated that all these systems behave in a similar way despite the different molecular compositions of their constituents: lamellar, hexagonal and triply periodic phases, like gyroid or diamond structures, are found in all these systems, which besides exhibit phase diagrams with the same topology. The behavior under confinement of colloidal nanoparticles interacting with the short range attraction and long range repulsion (SALR) potential is studied by means of Monte Carlo simulations in the Grand Canonical ensemble. It is demonstrated that system behaves in confinement in the same way as the block co-polymer systems.