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Abstract
Diamond-structured crystals, particularly those with cubic symmetry, have long been attractive targets for the programmed self-assembly of colloidal particles, due to their applications as photonic crystals that can control the flow of visible light. While spherical particles decorated with four patches in a tetrahedral arrangement-tetrahedral patchy particles-should be an ideal building block for this endeavor, their self-assembly into colloidal diamond has proved elusive. The kinetics of self-assembly pose a major challenge, with competition from an amorphous glassy phase, as well as clathrate crystals, leaving a narrow widow of patch widths where tetrahedral patchy particles can self-assemble into diamond crystals. Here we demonstrate that a two-component system of tetrahedral patchy particles, where bonding is allowed only between particles of different types to select even-member rings, undergoes crystallization into diamond crystals over a significantly wider range of patch widths conducive for experimental fabrication. We show that the crystallization in the two-component system is both thermodynamically and kinetically enhanced, as compared to the one-component system. Although our bottom-up route does not lead to the selection of the cubic polytype exclusively, we find that the cubicity of the self-assembled crystals increases with increasing patch width. Our designer system not only promises a scalable bottom-up route for colloidal diamond but also offers fundamental insight into crystallization into open lattices.
Original language | English |
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Article number | e2109776118 |
Number of pages | 7 |
Journal | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America |
Volume | 118 |
Issue number | 48 |
Early online date | 24 Nov 2021 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 30 Nov 2021 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright © 2021 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.Keywords
- colloidal self-assembly
- tetrahedral networks
- tetrahedral patchy particles
- diamond lattice
- polytype selection
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Dive into the research topics of 'Facile self-assembly of colloidal diamond from tetrahedral patchy particles via ring selection'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Finished
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Polymorph selection in hierarchical self-assembly pathways into open colloidal crystals
1/03/19 → 28/02/22
Project: Research Councils
Datasets
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Research data supporting the publication "Facile self-assembly of colloidal diamond from tetrahedral patchy particles via ring selection"
Neophytou, A. (Creator), Chakrabarti, D. (Creator) & Sciortino, F. (Creator), University of Birmingham, 12 Sept 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25500/edata.bham.00000711
Dataset