Colloidal suspensions have been part of the repertoire of human industry since Paleolithic artists first dispersed pulverized minerals in rendered animal fat to make paint. Remarkably, colloidal suspensions' primary industrial applications have changed little in the 20 or 30 millennia since. People use colloidal suspensions to disperse materials into fluid media without dissolving them. Familiar examples include surface coatings such as paints and inks, and slurries used for paper making and powder transport. Dividing the material finely enough to disperse it sometimes instills the resulting particles with novel properties. Ancient Romans took advantage of quantum confinement effects in metallic and semiconductor nanoclusters to color glass—research on the mechanisms and applications of nanoclusters' properties is ongoing. In all of these cases, the dispersed material is the important agent; colloidal dispersal simply facilitates its exploitation. More recently, colloidal particles have been deliberately used to modify the rheological properties of their carrier fluids. For these applications, the material from which the colloidal particles are made is less important than how their dispersal influences the medium.

This issue of MRS Bulletin focuses on a new class of applications for colloidal suspensions stemming from some particles' innate ability to organize themselves into beautifully ordered arrays. These colloidal crystals acquire interesting and useful properties not only from their constituent materials but also from the spontaneous emergence of mesoscopic order that characterizes their internal structure.