Orientational Ordering of Janus Particle Arrays as Classical Compass Spin Systems
Abstract
Janus-particle arrays provide a soft-matter platform in which particle orientations act as classical spins with anisotropic, bond-dependent interactions. Motivated by recent experiments on triangular arrays of metallodielectric Janus particles exhibiting sixfold orientational order and directly observable vortices and antivortices, we study effective models beyond the isotropic XY description. A classical 120∘ compass model captures the minimal bond-directional interaction, while an effective Kern--Frenkel model incorporates the geometry of the Janus surface interaction more directly. Monte Carlo simulations show that both models exhibit a low-temperature sixfold ordered phase, a high-temperature disordered phase, and an intermediate quasi-long-range-ordered regime consistent with two Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless transitions. In both cases, the sixfold order arises through thermal order-by-disorder from a continuously degenerate ferromagnetic manifold. We further show that higher-order extensions of the 120∘ interaction can alter the orientational selection: a quadratic term reverses the fluctuation-induced sixfold anisotropy, while a cubic term lifts the degeneracy energetically and selects the lattice-aligned directions that coincide with those observed experimentally. These results connect the microscopic anisotropy of Janus-particle interactions to emergent XY-like vortex physics and illustrate how distinct microscopic mechanisms can produce similar sixfold orientational order.
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BibTeX
@misc{fan2026orientational,
title = {{Orientational Ordering of Janus Particle Arrays as Classical Compass Spin Systems}},
author = {Zhijie Fan and Myeonggon Park and Marija Vucelja and Gia-Wei Chern},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.30025},
eprint = {2609.30025},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30025},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Orientational Ordering of Janus Particle Arrays as Classical Compass Spin Systems
AU - Zhijie Fan
AU - Myeonggon Park
AU - Marija Vucelja
AU - Gia-Wei Chern
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/24
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.30025
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.30025
AB - Janus-particle arrays provide a soft-matter platform in which particle orientations act as classical spins with anisotropic, bond-dependent interactions. Motivated by recent experiments on triangular arrays of metallodielectric Janus particles exhibiting sixfold orientational order and directly observable vortices and antivortices, we study effective models beyond the isotropic XY description. A classical 120^∘ compass model captures the minimal bond-directional interaction, while an effective Kern--Frenkel model incorporates the geometry of the Janus surface interaction more directly. Monte Carlo simulations show that both models exhibit a low-temperature sixfold ordered phase, a high-temperature disordered phase, and an intermediate quasi-long-range-ordered regime consistent with two Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless transitions. In both cases, the sixfold order arises through thermal order-by-disorder from a continuously degenerate ferromagnetic manifold. We further show that higher-order extensions of the 120^∘ interaction can alter the orientational selection: a quadratic term reverses the fluctuation-induced sixfold anisotropy, while a cubic term lifts the degeneracy energetically and selects the lattice-aligned directions that coincide with those observed experimentally. These results connect the microscopic anisotropy of Janus-particle interactions to emergent XY-like vortex physics and illustrate how distinct microscopic mechanisms can produce similar sixfold orientational order.
ER -