Spring 2021: C. Patrick Royall moves to ESPCI Paris.
Our study about the efficacy of face coverings in reducing transmission of COVID-19 was published in Physics of Fluids (link to paper)
We also provide the link to the arxiv, with the executive summary.
Our work on the hard-rods gel with Claudia Ferreiro-Córdova and Jeroen van Duijneveldt is accepted by PNAS!
(link to paper)
Bad news for making glasses: New universal mechanism of crystallisation discovered in mixtures. Published in PRX with Roskilde group, Denmark.
(link to paper)
Josh Robinson's Herculean efforts to seek the truth are rewarded with an Editor's Pick in Phys. Rev. Lett. In addition to the paper, read the view point about it.
cover article
Congratulations to Ioatzin Rios de Anda for her excellent mermaid artwork, which was selected for the cover of Soft Matter, not to mention being the most remarkable Mexican Student in the UK
James Hallett introduces Nano-Particle Resolved Studies, which uses STED nanoscopy to track the coordinates of particles so much smaller than the state-of-the-art that the sampling increases by a thousand times.
(link to paper)
Congratulations to Nariaki Sakai for winning the poster prize at Unifying Concepts in Glass Physics VII and Jun Dong for winning the poster prize at the Institue of Physics School "Solutions in the Spring" 2018.
Not recent News

What's the fuss all about?

We combine particle-resolved studies of nanoparticles with computer simulation to tackle outstanding questions in condensed matter. Liquids of nanoparticles which can be resolved at the particle level obey the same statistical mechanics as atoms. For example, critical phenomena in nanoparticles are entirely analogous to those in molecular liquids, with the advantage that this exotic behavior can be studied at room temperature and pressure, due to the special interactions between nanoparticles [link].

The fate of metastable liquids is among the grand challenges of condensed matter. Metastable liquids underlie nucleation of crystals [self-assembly] and the glass transition. In the case of the latter, it is not known whether there is a glass transition in the thermodynamic sense [materials are termed glasses once they become "viscous enough"]. We are aided in unraveling these challenges by the topological cluster classification, our unique tool for decomposing amorphous materials into a zoo of 33 different clusters. The prevalence and lifetimes of these clusters tells us about the possibility of the emergence of an "ideal glass phase" in a deeply supercooled liquid, and also provides insight into nucleation pathways when materials crystallize or melt [link].

Metastable liquids exhibit a host of unexpected phenomena. Nanoparticle liquids undergo sedimentation under gravity and laning [like pedestrians on pavements].