Hyperuniformity of self-assembled soft colloidal spheres

Hyperuniformity characterizes a state of matter for which density fluctuations vanish on large scales. Hyperuniform materials are of technological importance as they exhibit interesting photonic properties. We have shown that such materials can be obtained by assembling spheres into a disordered jammed 2D- packing. To this end, we use a binary mixture of large and small Poly(NIPAM) particles confined between two cover slips. These soft spheres have been chosen for their temperature-sensitive properties. We can locally increase or decrease the volume fraction occupied by the spheres by finely tuning the temperature. By applying various temperature patterns, we are studying the spatial arrangements of the microgels and characterizing their hyperuniform properties through reconstruction and detection algorithms.