The central focus of this symposium is the spontaneous emergence of order in self-assembling systems, combining fundamental physics, theoretical descriptions, and the characterization of structure formation with applied aspects of process considerations and optimizations, and the application of emergent properties in the design of advanced materials. The bottom-up design of nanostructured materials and coatings, and its versatile use to control material properties, continue to attract researchers from different scientific backgrounds. This symposium aims to bring together these communities by focusing on unifying motifs—how to control, describe and characterize the phase behavior of self-assembling colloidal systems to create defined nanostructured materials and surfaces. Areas of rapid development in the field include the discovery of complex self-assembled structures from simulation and experiments (both in two- and three-dimensional systems), the targeted creation of materials by inverse design, and the incorporation of machine-learning techniques to catalyze these studies. Different kinds of order are being investigated, from crystalline—including aperiodic—structures to liquid crystals or other mesophases, as well as structures with partial intrinsic disorder. Contributions will include emergent order—in and out of equilibrium—discovered by experimental, computational, or theoretical methods and across the full range of particulate systems on the mesoscale, including colloidal and nanoscopic particles, patchy particles, active particles, micellar systems, as well as soft particles and microgels. The interactions within these systems can be tailored, for example, via (screened) electrostatics, steric repulsion, depletion, H-bonding, DNA functionalization, or via external fields. However, the focus of this symposium is to control interactions as a means to assemble particles into mesoscale structures, not to self-assemble the building blocks alone (DNA origami, protein folding, etc.). Contributions will also include investigations of the emergent functional properties of such mesoscale materials—photonic, phononic, mechanical, etc.—as well as templating processes to create functional surface patterns and materials. By featuring different materials systems and therefore different applications and functionalities, the symposium will assemble members of a variety of communities within MRS and therefore lead to new synergies and interdisciplinary connections.

colloid crystal crystallization crystallographic structure hierarchical liquid crystal nanostructure phase transformation