title: Crystalline multilayers of charged colloids in soft confinement: experiment versus theory.
abstract: We combine real-space experiments and lattice sum calculations to investigate the phase diagram of charged colloidal particles under soft confinement. In the experiments we explore the equilibrium phase diagram of charged colloidal spheres in aqueous suspensions confined between two parallel charged walls at low background salt concentrations. Motivated by the experiments, we perform lattice sum minimizations to predict the crystalline ground state of point-like Yukawa particles which are exposed to a soft confining wall potential. In the multilayered crystalline regime, we obtain good agreement between the experimental and numerical findings: upon increasing the density we recover the sequence [structure: see text].
authors.affiliation: Institut für Theoretische Physik II, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany. ecoguz@thphy.uni-duesseldorf.de
authors.forename: E C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Oğuz
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Reinmüller
authors.forename: H J
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Schöpe
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Palberg
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Messina
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Löwen