Disentangling the n-body contributions of colloidal interactions induced by random light fields

Artificial random light fields induce interactions between colloidal particles and, according to [1], it is possible to control these induced pair interactions in order to engineer the dynamics and equilibrium configurations of a colloidal suspension. While an analytical formulation for these pair interactions exists [1], the 3-body to N-body contributions of the interaction in such systems are not well known. In this talk, we shall discuss the numerical computation of the many-body contributions and how to approximate them. Furthermore, we shall also discuss how these contributions scale with the different system parameters in different configurations, like random close packing configurations, in order to perform molecular dynamics simulations in an efficient way.

[1] Brügger, G., Froufe-Pérez, L., Scheffold, F. et al. Controlling dispersion forces between small particles with artificially created random light fields. Nat Commun 6, 7460 (2015)