Orientation-Controlled Three-Body Polarization in Rotating-Field Colloidal Materials

Abstract

Electrically responsive colloidal particles provide a convenient platform for creating reconfigurable microstructures, but their interaction cannot always be reduced to a sum of independent pair potentials. We study the nonadditive polarization of dielectric microspheres subjected to a circularly rotating electric field, focusing on how three-particle geometry controls the effective interaction.

Using a self-consistent multipole description validated against boundary-element calculations, we map the three-body contribution for triplets with different internal shapes and different orientations relative to the field-rotation plane. The calculations show that compactness alone does not determine the correction: its magnitude and sign are selected jointly by particle arrangement and the orientation of the local triplet plane. This becomes especially important in finite three-dimensional clusters, where different neighboring triplets generally occupy different planes.

We further test how isolated-triplet contributions enter the interaction energy of clusters containing four to six particles. A compact geometry-based surrogate is used only as an efficient representation of the calculated three-body term. The results identify when pairwise models remain adequate and when nonadditive polarization must be retained, providing a physically interpretable route for screening field-controlled colloidal structures and designing reconfigurable colloidal materials.

The research was funded by the Russian Science Foundation (project No. 25-22-00870).

Speaker

Simkin Ivan
Soft Matter and Physics of Fluids Centre, Bauman Moscow State Technical University, 5, 2nd Baumanskaya Street, Moscow
Russia

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