Related papers: Frustrated Self-Assembly of Non-Euclidean Crystals…
Geometric frustration is a fundamental concept in various areas of physics, and its role in self-assembly processes has recently been recognized as a source of intricate self-limited structures. Here we present an analytic theory of the…
DNA is an ideal candidate to organize matter on the nanoscale, primarily due to the specificity and complexity of DNA based interactions. Recent advances in this direction include the self-assembly of colloidal crystals using DNA grafted…
Polymer-grafted nanoparticles are versatile building blocks that self-assemble into a rich diversity of mesostructures. Coarse-grained molecular simulations have commonly accompanied experiments by resolving structure formation pathways and…
Experiments have reached a monumental capacity for designing and synthesizing microscopic particles for self-assembly, making it possible to precisely control particle concentrations, shapes, and interactions. However, more physical insight…
Geometric frustration offers a pathway to soft matter self-assembly with controllable finite sizes. While the understanding of frustration in soft matter assembly derives almost exclusively from continuum elastic descriptions, a current…
Entropic self-assembly is governed by the shape of the constituent particles, yet a priori prediction of crystal structures from particle shape alone is non-trivial for anything but the simplest of space-filling shapes. At the same time,…
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…
The observation by Ke et al. [Science 338, 1177 (2012)] that large numbers of short, pre-designed DNA strands can assemble into three-dimensional target structures came as a great surprise, as no colloidal self-assembling system has ever…
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…
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…
Open structures can display a number of unusual properties, including a negative Poisson's ratio, negative thermal expansion, and holographic elasticity, and have many interesting applications in engineering. However, it is a grand…
Controlling the self-assembly of supramolecular structures is vital for living cells, and a central challenge for engineering at the nano- and microscales. Nevertheless, even particles without optimized shapes can robustly form well-defined…
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…
We study the problem of the self-assembly of nanoparticles (NPs) into finite mesoscopic structures with a programmed local morphology and complex overall shape. Our proposed building blocks are NPs directionally-functionalized with DNA. The…
Interaction between dipolar forces, such as permanent magnets, generally leads to the formation of one-dimensional chains and rings. We investigated whether it was possible to let dipoles self-assemble into three-dimensional structures by…
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…
This perspective will overview an emerging paradigm for self-organized soft materials, {\it geometrically-frustrated assemblies}, where interactions between self-assembling elements (e.g. particles, macromolecules, proteins) favor local…
Self-assembly in the laboratory can now yield `information-rich' nanostructures in which each component is of a distinct type and has a defined spatial position. Ensuring the thermodynamic stability of such structures requires…
Nanoparticles with "sticky patches" have long been proposed as building blocks for the self-assembly of complex structures. The synthetic realizability of such patchy particles, however, greatly lags behind predictions of patterns they…
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…