On the Convective Self-Assembly of Colloidal Particles in Nanofluid Based on in Situ Measurements of Interaction Forces

While the currently available techniques for the self-assembly of colloidal particles show great promise owing to their simplicity and high efficiency, they are plagued by the fact that they result in colloidal crystals with defects. Here, in order to overcome this problem, we propose a strategy that uses a suspension of nanoparticles (i.e., a nanofluid) as the "solvent" for the colloidal particles. We fabricated colloidal films of microspheres...