Surprises in patchy colloids
Prof. Paulo Ivo Teixeira (Instituto Superior de Engenharia de Lisboa and Centro de Fisica Teorica e Computacional da Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal)

Simple models of hard spherical particles with bonding sites are relevant to understanding a range of systems, including patchy colloids (‘super atoms’ with controlled functionality on the scale of microns) and biopolymers. The anisotropic interactions promote aggregation (self-assembly) of the particles, which may form what is known as network fluids. In this talk I shall discuss some new results for the model with two patches of type A and a variable number of patches of type B, which are responsible, respectively, for chaining and branching of the networks. In particular we find that we are able to obtain an unconventional “pinched”, or re-entrant, phase diagram, similar to that predicted by Tlusty and Safran [T. Tlusty and S. A. Safran, Science 290, 1328 (2000)] using a more coarse-grained theory.