Interplay between spherical confinement and particle shape on the self-assembly of rounded cubes

Da Wang (), Michiel Hermes, Ramakrishna Kotni, Yaoting Wu, Nikos Tasios, Yang Liu, Bart de Nijs, Ernest B. van der Wee, Christopher B. Murray, Marjolein Dijkstra and Alfons van Blaaderen ()
Additional contact information
Da Wang: Utrecht University
Michiel Hermes: Utrecht University
Ramakrishna Kotni: Utrecht University
Yaoting Wu: University of Pennsylvania
Nikos Tasios: Utrecht University
Yang Liu: Utrecht University
Bart de Nijs: Utrecht University
Ernest B. van der Wee: Utrecht University
Christopher B. Murray: University of Pennsylvania
Marjolein Dijkstra: Utrecht University
Alfons van Blaaderen: Utrecht University

Nature Communications, 2018, vol. 9, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Self-assembly of nanoparticles (NPs) inside drying emulsion droplets provides a general strategy for hierarchical structuring of matter at different length scales. The local orientation of neighboring crystalline NPs can be crucial to optimize for instance the optical and electronic properties of the self-assembled superstructures. By integrating experiments and computer simulations, we demonstrate that the orientational correlations of cubic NPs inside drying emulsion droplets are significantly determined by their flat faces. We analyze the rich interplay of positional and orientational order as the particle shape changes from a sharp cube to a rounded cube. Sharp cubes strongly align to form simple-cubic superstructures whereas rounded cubes assemble into icosahedral clusters with additionally strong local orientational correlations. This demonstrates that the interplay between packing, confinement and shape can be utilized to develop new materials with novel properties.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04644-4 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:9:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-018-04644-4

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

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-04644-4

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 ().