Related papers: Patterns without patches: Hierarchical assembly of…
A major goal in nanoscience and nanotechnology is the self-assembly of any desired complex structure with a system of particles interacting through simple potentials. To achieve this objective, intense experimental and theoretical efforts…
Direct design of complex functional materials would revolutionize technologies ranging from printable organs to novel clean energy devices. However, even incremental steps towards designing functional materials have proven challenging. If…
We use numerical simulations to show how noninteracting hard particles binding to a deformable elastic shell may self-assemble into a variety of linear patterns. This is a result of the nontrivial elastic response to deformations of shells.…
We explore the use of templated self-assembly to facilitate the formation of complex target structures made from patchy particles. First, we consider the templating of high-symmetry shell structures around a spherical core particle. We find…
Patchy particles have proven to be a prominent model for studying the self-assembly behavior of various systems, ranging from finite clusters to bulk crystal assemblies, and from synthetic colloidal particles to viruses. The patchy particle…
The rapid progress in precisely designing the surface decoration of patchy colloidal particles offers a new, yet unexperienced freedom to create building entities for larger, more complex structures in soft matter systems. However, it is…
Building structures with hierarchical order through the self-assembly of smaller blocks is not only a prerogative of nature, but also a strategy to design artificial materials with tailored functions. We explore in simulation the…
Fabrication of diamond structures by self-assembly is a fundamental challenge in making three-dimensional photonic crystals. We simulate a system of model hard particles with attractive patches and show that they can self-assemble into a…
It is widely accepted that self-assembling building blocks is one of the promising ways for engineering new materials. Recent years reveal substantial progress in fabricating colloidal particles, polymer blocks and supramolecular aggregates…
Patchy colloids are promising candidates for building blocks in directed self-assembly. To be successful the surface patterns need to both be simple enough to be synthesized, while feature-rich enough to cause the colloids to self-assemble…
We systematically study the design of simple patchy sphere models that reversibly self-assemble into monodisperse icosahedral clusters. We find that the optimal patch width is a compromise between structural specificity (the patches must be…
Multilevel self-assembly involving small structured groups of nano-particles provides new routes to development of functional materials with a sophisticated architecture. Apart from the inter-particle forces, the geometrical shapes and…
We propose a new strategy for robust high-quality self-assembly of non-trivial periodic structures out of patchy particles, and investigate it with Brownian Dynamics (BD) simulations. Its first element is the use of specific patch-patch and…
Elastic sheets with macroscopic dimensions are easy to deform by bending and stretching. Yet shaping nanometric sheets by mechanical manipulation is hard. Here we show that nanoparticle self-assembly could be used to this end. We…
One of the fundamental goals of nanotechnology is to exploit selective and directional interactions between molecules to design particles that self-assemble into desired structures, from capsids, to nano-clusters, to fully formed crystals…
In living cells, proteins self-assemble into large functional structures based on specific interactions between molecularly complex patches. Due to this complexity, protein self-assembly results from a competition between a large number of…
We report on self-assemblies formed from spherical patchy particles interacting by a long-range attraction through a patch region in a two-dimensional system. We performed Monte Carlo simulations to find stable structures in a system with…
Manipulating the way in which colloidal particles self-organise is a central challenge in the design of functional soft materials. Meeting this challenge requires the use of building blocks that interact with one another in a highly…
Recent simulations have studied the formation of patterns in a binary mixture of immiscible surfactants absorbed onto the surface of a spherical nanoparticle. The resulting patterns (Janus, spots and stripes) were in good agreement with…
Mutually repelling particles form spontaneously ordered clusters when forced into confinement. The clusters may adopt similar spatial arrangements even if the underlying particle interactions are contrastingly different. Here we demonstrate…