Related papers: Rationalizing Euclidean Assemblies of Hard Polyhed…
Polyhedra and their arrangements have intrigued humankind since the ancient Greeks and are today important motifs in condensed matter, with application to many classes of liquids and solids. Yet, little is known about the thermodynamically…
We report the formation of a binary crystal of hard polyhedra due solely to entropic forces. Although the alternating arrangement of octahedra and tetrahedra is a known space-tessellation, it had not previously been observed in…
The self-assembly of hard polyhedral particles confined to a flat interface is studied using Monte Carlo simulations. The particles are pinned to the interface by restricting their movement in the direction perpendicular to it while…
Monodisperse spherical colloidal particles confined within emulsion droplets can crystallize into icosahedral clusters. Experimentally it was observed that a few large colloidal particles added as defects preferentially migrate to the…
Entropy alone can self-assemble hard particles into colloidal crystals of remarkable complexity whose structures are the same as atomic and molecular crystals, but with larger lattice spacings. Although particle-based molecular simulation…
Self-organized complex structures in nature, e.g. viral capsids, hierarchical biopolymers, and bacterial flagella, offer efficiency, adaptability, robustness, and multi-functionality. Can we program the self-assembly of three-dimensional…
We apply a simple model system of patchy particles to study monodisperse self-assembly, using the Platonic solids as target structures. We find marked differences between the assembly behaviours of the different systems. Tetrahedra,…
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…
Spherical particles confined to a sphere surface cannot pack densely into a hexagonal lattice without defects. In this study, we use hard particle Monte Carlo simulations to determine the effects of continuously deformable shape anisotropy…
A fundamental characteristic of matter is its ability to form ordered structures under the right thermodynamic conditions. Predicting these structures - and their properties - from the attributes of a material's building blocks is the holy…
Depletion interactions arise from entropic forces, and their ability to induce aggregation and even ordering of colloidal particles through self-assembly is well established, especially for spherical colloids. We vary the size and…
Colloidal crystal structures with complexity and diversity rivaling atomic and molecular crystals have been predicted and obtained for hard particles by entropy maximization. However, so far homochiral colloidal crystals, which are…
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…
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…
Dense packings have served as useful models of the structure of liquid, glassy and crystal states of matter, granular media, heterogeneous materials, and biological systems. Probing the symmetries and other mathematical properties of the…
Dense polyhedron packings are useful models of a variety of condensed matter and biological systems and have intrigued scientists mathematicians for centuries. Recently, organizing principles for the types of structures associated with the…
Colloidal crystals are used to understand fundamentals of atomic rearrangements in condensed matter and build complex metamaterials with unique functionalities. Simulations predict a multitude of self-assembled crystal structures from…
A crystal lattice, when confined to the surface of a cylinder, must have a periodic structure that is commensurate with the cylinder circumference. This constraint can frustrate the system, leading to oblique crystal lattices or to…
We formulate the problem of generating dense packings of nonoverlapping, non-tiling polyhedra within an adaptive fundamental cell subject to periodic boundary conditions as an optimization problem, which we call the Adaptive Shrinking Cell…
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…