“…A common theme in soft condensed matter physics and biological physics is the formation of large ordered structures from smaller building blocks [1,2] that are sometimes analogs of ordered phases in (hard) condensed matter. These structures can be macroscopic in size, such as bulk (liquid) crystals [3,4], plastic crystals [5,6], quasicrystals [7,8] and ferrofluids [9], but also mescoscopic structures are found, such as the double-stranded helix in DNA molecules [10], the secondary (and ternary) structures in proteins [11], micelles and membranes [1], and periodic structures in block copolymers [12]. In this paper, we will show that like-charged colloidal spheres can form also mesoscopic structures, such as alternating strings and clusters, which we will investigate both in experiment and in theory.…”