Anisotropic capillary interactions and jamming of colloidal particles trapped at a liquid-fluid interface

We determine the capillary attraction and equilibrium configurations of particles trapped at a liquid-fluid interface due to the pinning of their contact line. We calculate analytically the asymptotic interaction energy between two particles and, numerically, the multibody energy landscape for up to four contacting particles. Our results are consistent with recent experiments. We show that a system composed of a large number of such particles behaves as a jammed system.