A team of UCSB postdocs and graduate students in the Begley Lab provided the cover of the December issue of Extreme Mechanics Letters. Their work "Acoustic field controlled patterning and assembly of anisotropic particles", explores highly-organized particle assembly at the microscale and carries transformative implications for fields ranging from medical diagnostics to materials-by-design.

Dr. Rachel Collino, Dr. Tyler Ray, Rachel Fleming, and Camille Sasaki demonstrate how the tunable ordering of micro-scale rods, bricks, and bowties using acoustic pressure waves, can produce columns with controlled spacing or highly-regular "brick-and-mortar" packing. Notably, this method does not require surface functionalization and is broadly agnostic to colloidal chemistry or particle properties. The work demonstrates particle arrays preserved in hydrogel matrices or bound together with DNA "mortar"; the latter provides sufficient stability and flexibility to twist and fold assembled "ribbons" by tuning the direction of acoustic waves.

For the full article, please go to: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352431615001078.