Congratulations to Vahid Nasirimarekani for having his work featured on a cover of Advanced Functional Materials.
The paper entitled: Tunable Superparamagnetic Ring (tSPRing) for Droplet Manipulation by Vahid Nasirimarekani, Fernando Benito-Lopez and Lourdes Basabe-Desmonts presents and characterizes experimentally the formation and properties of a tunable superparamagnetic ring (tSPRing), which precisely adjusts itself around a water droplet, due to liquid-liquid interaction, and enables the physical manipulation of droplets. The ring is made of an oil-based ferrofluid, a stable suspension of ferromagnetic particles in an oily phase. It appears spontaneously due to the oil-water interfacial interaction under the influence of a magnetic field. The ferrofluid-water interaction resembles a cupcake assembly, with the surrounding ring only at the base of the droplet. The ring is analogous to a soft matter ring magnet, showing dipole repulsive forces, which stabilizes the droplets on a surface. It enables robust, controllable and programmable manipulation of enclosed water droplets. This work opens the door to new applications in open surface upside or upside-down microfluidics and lays the groundwork for new studies on tunable interfaces between two immiscible liquids.
Advanced Functional Materials has an impact factor of 16.836.
