Reply to "Failure to replicate long-range tunable attractions in colloidal system"

TL;DR

This paper defends previous findings of tunable attractions in colloidal systems against a critique that failed to replicate the results, providing detailed responses to criticisms and clarifications.

Contribution

It offers a detailed rebuttal to a critique claiming inability to replicate long-range tunable attractions, reaffirming prior experimental results.

Findings

Critique was unable to replicate the original attraction effects

Authors provided detailed responses to criticisms

Original results remain valid after rebuttal

Abstract

An arxiv paper, ref. [1] by Cao et al., claimed that the tunable attraction reported in our ref. [2] could not be detected. Ref. [1] was submitted to Nature in Apr. 2016 as a Comment on our ref. [2]. Our reply in May 2016 responded to ref. [1] and was reviewed by the editor of Nature and an external referee. Ref. [1] was rejected by Nature in Aug. 2016. We provide our reply, which answers all of the criticisms in ref. [1], in Appendix I. The main text contains a brief reply to the main criticisms.