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I shall describe our recent work on the self-assembly of colloidal particles at a quasi-two-dimensional air-water interface of a drying droplet. Using bright-field microscopy, we demonstrated that increasing particle elasticity drives interfacial organization from repulsion-stabilized crystallization to attraction-dominated gelation, via diverse metastable structures including clusters, voids and anisotropic aggregates. Molecular dynamics simulations using an effective potential that captures the interplay between hydrophobic, capillary, steric and dipolar interactions, reproduced the overall phenomenology of the observed colloidal morphogenesis. Our findings establish particle elasticity as a key parameter governing non-equilibrium structural organization of colloids at an interface. |