On February 6, 2024, I gave a plenary talk at the User Meeting of the European Synchrotron ESRF about our recent research. You can see it on YouTube

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In the scientific world, I have a slightly different name. Please don't try to use the spelling used on top of this page if you like to find my publications in Web of Science or another publication database. That is the "official" spelling of my name as in the passport. All my publications are signed as Andrei V. Petukhov or A.V. Petukhov. For historical reasons and due to the ambiguity of the transliteration from Cyrillic alphabet, my official name is not exactly the same as my scientific name. My publications and their citation score can be seen at my Google scholar, ORCID, ResearchGate and Publons pages.

My scientific interests are mostly related to self-organisation of colloids of size varying from a few nm nanoparticles ("quantum dots") to a couple of micron "elephants". We use spheres and cubes, platelets, rods and boards, complex-shape particles with protrusions and Janus particles. We vary the details of interparticle interactions, we apply different external fields and we look at confinement effects. It is a lot of fun! If you like to learn more, please read our recent reviews on particle shape effects & their SAXS studies (2015) and entropic patchiness (2017).

In Utrecht I am known as "the SAXS man". Here SAXS stands for Small-Angle X-ray Scattering. My group does many experiments at synchrotron facilities, mostly at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). We intensively use the Dutch-Belgian beamline BM-26 DUBBLE and other ESRF public beamlines such as ID10 and ID02. We do a lot of SAXS and grazing-incidence SAXS (GISAXS), high-resolution x-ray diffraction (XRD) and GIXRD. Recently, we started to play with various x-ray microscopy techniques. If you like to get beamtime at the ESRF or another synchrotron, read my Guide to successful ESRF beamtime application.

Recent news (please see also news archive here)

I was working in the International Advisory Council of the Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University since 2016, as its chairman since 2017. On February 24, 2022, together with the Council vice-chair philosopher Prof. Thomas Spitzley (Universität Duisburg/Essen), I resigned from this post. In our letter we wrote: "To our minds, the activities of the Council should have nothing to do with politics. It was always our policy to restrict our discussions to science and teaching. However, in view of the latest news, we are no longer able to separate our activities in the Council from general politics and we now feel uncomfortable with our status as Council members and, thereby, in a sense, as representatives of the IKBFU. We, therefore, have decided not only to resign with immediate effect from our offices as chair and vice-chair of IAC but also from the IKBFU International Advisory Council."