Reply to "Failure to replicate long-range tunable attractions in colloidal system"

Abstract

An arxiv paper, ref. [1] by Cao et al., claimed that the tunable attraction reported in our ref. [2] could not be detected. Ref. [1] was submitted to Nature in Apr. 2016 as a Comment on our ref. [2]. Our reply in May 2016 responded to ref. [1] and was reviewed by the editor of Nature and an external referee. Ref. [1] was rejected by Nature in Aug. 2016. We provide our reply, which answers all of the criticisms in ref. [1], in Appendix I. The main text contains a brief reply to the main criticisms.