Anisotropic elasticity in confocal studies of colloidal crystals

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the elastic properties of colloidal crystals, observed in confocal slices, vary with anisotropy, providing both numerical and exact analytical insights into projected fluctuations.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical approach based on FFT to study anisotropic elastic fluctuations and derives exact results for high-symmetry cases in colloidal crystals.

Findings

Projected elastic fluctuations depend on crystal anisotropy.

Numerical methods effectively analyze fluctuation evolution.

Exact analytical results are obtained for symmetric cases.

Abstract

We consider the theory of fluctuations of a colloidal solid observed in a confocal slice. For a cubic crystal we study the evolution of the projected elastic properties as a function of the anisotropy of the crystal using numerical methods based on the fast Fourier transform. In certain situations of high symmetry we find exact analytic results for the projected fluctuations.