Vector assembly of colloids on monolayer substrates

Lingxiang Jiang (), Shenyu Yang, Boyce Tsang, Mei Tu and Steve Granick ()
Additional contact information
Lingxiang Jiang: College of Chemistry and Materials Science, Jinan University
Shenyu Yang: College of Chemistry and Materials Science, Jinan University
Boyce Tsang: University of Illinois
Mei Tu: College of Chemistry and Materials Science, Jinan University
Steve Granick: Center for Soft and Living Matter, Institute for Basic Science (IBS)

Nature Communications, 2017, vol. 8, issue 1, 1-7

Abstract: Abstract The key to spontaneous and directed assembly is to encode the desired assembly information to building blocks in a programmable and efficient way. In computer graphics, raster graphics encodes images on a single-pixel level, conferring fine details at the expense of large file sizes, whereas vector graphics encrypts shape information into vectors that allow small file sizes and operational transformations. Here, we adapt this raster/vector concept to a 2D colloidal system and realize ‘vector assembly’ by manipulating particles on a colloidal monolayer substrate with optical tweezers. In contrast to raster assembly that assigns optical tweezers to each particle, vector assembly requires a minimal number of optical tweezers that allow operations like chain elongation and shortening. This vector approach enables simple uniform particles to form a vast collection of colloidal arenes and colloidenes, the spontaneous dissociation of which is achieved with precision and stage-by-stage complexity by simply removing the optical tweezers.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15778 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:8:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms15778

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15778

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().