September 4, 2017

Impressions from ECIS 2017

I'm in Madrid for the 31st conference of the European Colloid and Interface Society. Here are some highlights from the morning session:

Michael Cates on active colloids (plenary session)

I arrived late and missed some of this talk, plus I'm not a specialist in the area of active colloids. What I found interesting is the search for the minimal modification of the various Hohenberg-Halperin models (B and H) that yield interesting behaviour; I still haven't understood how breaking the time-reversal symmetry comes into play. Here is a reference I promised myself I would read on the flight back home.

Parallel session on topics 5 and 6 (roughly, inorganic colloids)

Two talks on secondary structures in gold nanoparticle systems with potential applications to SERS:
Two other talks focused on magnetic nanoparticles:
  • Laura Rossi (Utrecht University) on the self-assembly of hematite cubes (paper not yet published).
  • Golnaz Isapour (Fribourg University, in the group of Marco Lattuada) on color-changing materials based on responsive polymers (pNIPAM for temperature and PVP for pH).
Aside from the nice work, the last talk also references a paper on Color change in chameleons, from which I learned that structures that generate structural colors are called iridophores (great name!), in contrast with the pigment-bearing chromatophores. I have already written about structural colors on this blog.


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