| The presence of second-type disorder in self-organised colloidal crystals is demonstrated on the basis of confocal microscopy. The study is performed for crystals consisting of colloidal hard spheres and hard polyhedral colloids. Using confocal microscopy single-crystalline domains were imaged and the particle coordinates were retrieved using particle tracking routines. To distinguish different types of disorder present in the crystals the corresponding diffraction patterns were computed from the real-space coordinates. The amount of second-type disorder is rather small for the crystal of the spheres, but increases dramatically for the crystal of the polyhedrals. This shows that the presence of second-type disorder sensitively depends on specific particle properties such as their shape. |
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