Coincident with the anniversary of the demise of our colleague Noé García Almarza, Soft Matter has published one of his last research studies that has also been highlighted in the Inside Front Cover of the aforementioned journal.

In this work the self-assembly of spherical particles with three attractive sites distributed symmetrically along the particle equator was investigated under planar confinement. The study of this type of colloidal systems is interesting both from a practical point of view, for the design of new materials with properties 'a la carte', and from a fundamental one, as they often exhibit unusual physical behavior. Indeed, in this article, it is shown that, under certain conditions, these trivalent particles assemble into a rather exotic hybrid solid-gas phase formed by a honey-comb lattice and a gas of particles located at the lattice voids. The concentration of particles at the interstices of the honey-comb lattice varies continuously with pressure without undergoing a true thermodynamic transition, so that at low pressure all the voids are empty, whereas at high pressure all are occupied forming a triangular lattice. The Mechanical Statistics and Condensed Matter group dedicates this work to the memory of our dear friend Noé.

Eva G. Noya, Noé G. Almarza & Enrique Lomba. “Assembly of trivalent particles under confinement: from an exotic solid phase to a liquid phase at low temperature”. Soft Matter 13, 3221 (2017).
DOI:10.1039/C7SM00217C