Optical assembly of nanostructures mediated by surface roughness
arXiv:2310.06774 · doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.134.088201
Abstract
Rigorous understanding of the self-assembly of colloidal nanocrystals is crucial to the development of tailored nanostructured materials. Despite extensive studies, a mechanistic understanding of self-assembly under non-equilibrium driven by an external field remains an ongoing challenge. We demonstrate self-assembly by optical tweezers imposing an external attractive field for cubic-phase sodium yttrium fluoride nanocrystals. We show that surface roughness of the nanocrystals is a decisive factor for contact leading to assembly between the nanocrystals, manifested by the roughness-dependent hydrodynamic resistivity. This provides direct evidence that dynamics are equally important to energetics in understanding self-assembly. These results have implications in a wide variety of different fields, such as in understanding the factors that mediate oriented attachment-based crystal growth or in interpreting the structure of binding sites on viruses.
arXiv comment21 pages, 3 main figures, 8 supplemental figures, 2 supplemental videos. Submitted to Physical Review Letters
References in corpus (5)
- Discontinuous Shear Thickening of Frictional Hard-Sphere Suspensions
- Roughness-dependent tribology effects on discontinuous shear thickening
- A rheological state diagram for rough colloids in shear flow
- Disentangling the roles of roughness, friction and adhesion in discontinuous shear thickening by means of thermo-responsive particles
- From yielding to shear jamming in a cohesive frictional suspension