Programming patchy particles to form three-dimensional dodecagonal quasicrystals

Abstract

Model patchy particles have been shown to be able to form a wide variety of structures, including symmetric clusters, complex crystals and even two-dimensional quasicrystals. Here, we investigate whether we can design patchy particles that form three-dimensional quasicrystals, in particular targeting a quasicrystal with dodecagonal symmetry that is made up of stacks of two-dimensional quasicrystalline layers. We obtain two designs that are able to form such a dodecagonal quasicrystal in annealing simulations. The first is a one-component system of 7-patch particles but with wide patches that allow them to adopt both 7- and 8-coordinated environments. The second is a ternary system that contains a mixture of 7- and 8-patch particles, and is likely to be more realizable in experiments, for example, using DNA origami. One interesting feature of the first system is that the resulting quasicrystals very often contain a screw dislocation.

10 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (4)

• Self-Assembly of Monatomic Complex Crystals and Quasicrystals with a Double-Well Interaction Potential
• Quasicrystalline Nanocrystal Superlattice with Partial Matching Rules
• Self-assembly of two-dimensional binary quasicrystals: A possible route to a DNA quasicrystal
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• Dissipative self-assembly of patchy particles under nonequilibrium drive: a computational study
• A one-component patchy-particle icosahedral quasicrystal
• Defects Enhance Stability in 12-fold Symmetric Soft-Matter Quasicrystals
• A patchy-particle 3-dimensional octagonal quasicrystal
• Phase Field Crystal model for particles with n-fold rotational symmetry in two dimensions