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Updated: Jul 7, 2026

Spatial Separation of Molecular Conformers and Clusters
Published on: January 9, 2014
Field-induced columnar structures in a quasi-two-dimensional system of dipolar particles
Shin-Shing Yeh1, Ching Hsueh, Peilong Chen
1Department of Physics and Center for Complex Systems, National Central University, Chungli 320, Taiwan.
Abstract:
We study the formation of columnar structures of uniaxial dipoles in an external magnetic field both experimentally and theoretically. By applying an external magnetic field parallel to a thin layer of a magnetorheological fluid, we manipulate a single initial cluster of suspended colloidal particles. We find that the cluster breaks up into columns that have approximately uniform widths and intercolumnar spacings. Both the average column width and inter column spacing are observed to vary linearly with column length. The observed linear relationships between column width and spacing versus the column length are interpreted theoretically by computing the potential energy of an ensemble of closed-packed columns of spherical dipolar particles.
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