Colloidal Diamond: 20 years in the making

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“The colloidal diamond has been a dream of researchers since the 1990s. These structures — stable, self-assembled formations of miniscule materials — have the potential to make light waves as useful as electrons in computing, and hold promise for a host of other applications. But while the idea of colloidal diamonds was developed decades ago, no one was able to reliably produce the structures. Until now. “ read more

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Is it a liquid?

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In simple fluids, such as water, invariance under parity and time-reversal symmetry imposes that the rotation of constituent ‘atoms’ is determined by the flow and that viscous stresses damp motion. Activation of the rotational degrees of freedom of a fluid by spinning its atomic building blocks breaks these constraints and has thus been the subject of fundamental theoretical interest across classical and quantum fluids. However, the creation of a model liquid that isolates chiral hydrodynamic phenomena has remained experimentally elusive. Here, we report the creation of … [read more]