Programming patchy particles to form complex periodic structures

Abstract

We introduce a scheme to design patchy particles so that a given target crystal is the global free-energy minimum at sufficiently low temperature. A key feature is a torsional component to the potential that only allows binding when particles have the correct relative orientations. In all examples studied, the target crystal structures readily assembled on annealing from a low-density fluid phase, albeit with the simpler target structures assembling more rapidly. The most complex example was a clathrate with 46 particles in its primitive unit cell. We also explored whether the structural information encoded in the particle interactions could be further reduced. For example, removing the torsional restrictions led to the assembly of an alternative crystal structure for the BC8-forming design, but the more complex clathrate design was still able to assemble because of the greater remaining specificity.

12 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Self-Assembly of Monatomic Complex Crystals and Quasicrystals with a Double-Well Interaction Potential
• The self-assembly and evolution of homomeric protein complexes
• Inverse design of simple pairwise interactions with low-coordinated 3D lattice ground states
• Self-assembly of two-dimensional binary quasicrystals: A possible route to a DNA quasicrystal
• Stabilizing quasicrystals composed of patchy colloids by narrowing the patch width

Cited by in corpus (10)

• The physics of Empty Liquids: from Patchy particles to Water
• Designing patchy interactions to self-assemble arbitrary structures
• SAT-assembly: A new approach for designing self-assembling systems
• A simple solution to the problem of self-assembling cubic diamond crystals
• Programming patchy particles to form three-dimensional dodecagonal quasicrystals
• Inverse design of two-dimensional structure by self-assembly of patchy particles
• Two-step nucleation in a binary mixture of Patchy Particles
• A one-component patchy-particle icosahedral quasicrystal
• A patchy-particle 3-dimensional octagonal quasicrystal
• Phase Field Crystal model for particles with n-fold rotational symmetry in two dimensions