title: Geometric Frustration of Colloidal Dimers on a Honeycomb Magnetic Lattice.
abstract: We study the phase behavior and the collective dynamics of interacting paramagnetic colloids assembled above a honeycomb lattice of triangular shaped magnetic minima. A frustrated colloidal molecular crystal is realized when filling these potential minima with exactly two particles per pinning site. External in-plane rotating fields are used to anneal the system into different phases, including long range ordered stripes, random fully packed loops, labyrinth and disordered states. At a higher amplitude of the annealing field, the dimer lattice displays a two-step melting transition where the initially immobile dimers perform first localized rotations and later break up by exchanging particles across consecutive lattice minima.
authors: Estructura i Constituents de la Matèria, Universitat de Barcelona, 08028 Barcelona, Spain and Institut de Nanociència i Nanotecnologia, Universitat de Barcelona, 08028 Barcelona, Spain.
authors: Pietro
authors: P
authors: Tierno
mesh_terms: D003102:Colloids / Q000737:chemistry*; D019281:Dimerization; D008956:Models, Chemical; D013816:Thermodynamics
chemical_list: D003102:Colloids