BACKGROUND Colloids consist of solid or liquid particles, each about a few hundred
nanometers in size, dispersed in a fluid and kept suspended by thermal fluctuations …

Reconfigurable, ordered matter offers great potential for future low-power computer memory
by storing information in energetically stable configurations. Among these, skyrmions …

Nanoscale ferroelectrics are expected to exhibit various exotic domain configurations, such
as the full flux-closure pattern that is well known in ferromagnetic materials. Here we …

Engineering synthetic materials that mimic the remarkable complexity of living organisms is
a fundamental challenge in science and technology. We studied the spatiotemporal patterns …

The dielectric tensor is a physical descriptor of fundamental light–matter interactions,
characterizing anisotropic materials with principal refractive indices and optic axes. Despite …

Micrometre-sized colloidal particles can be viewed as large atoms with tailorable size,
shape and interactions. These building blocks can assemble into extremely rich structures …

Humankind has been obsessed with knots in religion, culture and daily life for millennia,
while physicists like Gauss, Kelvin and Maxwell already involved them in models centuries …

The extraordinary responsiveness and large diversity of self-assembled structures of liquid
crystals are well documented and they have been extensively used in devices like displays …

We study how confinement transforms the chaotic dynamics of bulk microtubule-based
active nematics into regular spatiotemporal patterns. For weak confinements in disks …