Related papers: Controlling curvature of self-assembling surfaces …
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 surface curvature of membranes, interfaces, and substrates plays a crucial role in shaping the self-assembly of particles adsorbed on these surfaces. However, little is known about the interplay between particle anisotropy and surface…
The self-assembly of polymer grafted nanoparticles is more and more used in the field of functional materials. However, there is still a lack of analysis on the dynamic transformation paths of different self-assembly morphologies, which…
Conforming materials to rigid substrates with Gaussian curvature --- positive for spheres and negative for saddles --- has proven a versatile tool to guide the self-assembly of defects such as scars, pleats, folds, blisters, and liquid…
We propose a general framework for solving inverse self-assembly problems, i.e. designing interactions between elementary units such that they assemble spontaneously into a predetermined structure. Our approach uses patchy particles as…
One emerging approach for the fabrication of complex architectures on the nanoscale is to utilize particles customized to intrinsically self-assemble into a desired structure. Inverse methods of statistical mechanics have proven…
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…
The inverse problem of designing component interactions to target emergent structure is fundamental to numerous applications in biotechnology, materials science, and statistical physics. Equally important is the inverse problem of designing…
We propose an optimisation method for the inverse structural design of self-assembly of anisotropic patchy particles. The anisotropic interaction can be expressed by the spherical harmonics of the surface pattern on a patchy particle, and…
Colloidal self-assembly -- the spontaneous organization of colloids into ordered structures -- has been considered key to produce next-generation materials. However, the present-day staggering variety of colloidal building blocks and the…
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…
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…
The goal of inverse self-assembly is to design inter-particle interactions capable of assembling the units into a desired target structure. The effective assembly of complex structures often requires the use of multiple components, each new…
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…
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…
In geometrically frustrated assemblies local inter-subunit misfits propagate to intra-assembly strain gradients, giving rise to anomalous self-limiting assembly thermodynamics. Here, we use theory and coarse-grained simulation to study a…
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 show that geometric frustration in a broad class of deformable and naturally curved, shell-like colloidal particles gives rise to self-limiting assembly of finite-sized stacks that far exceed particle dimensions. When inter-particle…
We study the self-assembly behaviour of patchy particles with `protein-like' interactions that can be considered as a minimal model for the assembly of viral capsids and other shell-like protein complexes. We thoroughly explore the…
In this paper we introduce a new method to design interparticle interactions to target arbitrary crystal structures via the process of self-assembly. We show that it is possible to exploit the curvature of the crystal nucleation free-energy…