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Colloidal alloys with preassembled clusters and spheres

Nature Materials volume 16, pages 652–657 (2017)Cite this article

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Abstract

Self-assembly is a powerful approach for constructing colloidal crystals, where spheres, rods or faceted particles can build up a myriad of structures. Nevertheless, many complex or low-coordination architectures, such as diamond, pyrochlore and other sought-after lattices, have eluded self-assembly. Here we introduce a new design principle based on preassembled components of the desired superstructure and programmed nearest-neighbour DNA-mediated interactions, which allows the formation of otherwise unattainable structures. We demonstrate the approach using preassembled colloidal tetrahedra and spheres, obtaining a class of colloidal superstructures, including cubic and tetragonal colloidal crystals, with no known atomic analogues, as well as percolating low-coordination diamond and pyrochlore sublattices never assembled before.

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Figure 1: MgCu2 superlattice.
Figure 2: Phase behaviour of mixtures of DNA-coated colloidal spheres and tetrahedra.
Figure 3: Assemblies of colloidal tetrahedra and spheres.
Figure 4: Mixtures of tetrahedral clusters and spheres form a MgCu2 superlattice.
Figure 5: Bonding of a sphere in cages of tetrahedral clusters.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Crocker for useful conversations, I.-S. Jo and T. Y. Park for help with figures, and X. Zheng for help with particle synthesis. We also thank J. Dshemuchadse for identification of the tetragonal crystal structure. This research was supported by the US Army Research Office under MURI Grant Award No. W911NF-10-1-0518. G.-R.Y. acknowledges support from the NRF (Korea) under award numbers 2010-0029409, 2014S1A2A2028608 and 2014R1A2A2A01006628.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Soft Matter Research and Department of Physics, New York University, 726 Broadway, New York, New York 10003, USA

    Étienne Ducrot & David J. Pine

  2. Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering, New York University, 6 MetroTech Center, Brooklyn, New York 11201, USA

    Mingxin He & David J. Pine

  3. School of Chemical Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 440746, Republic of Korea

    Gi-Ra Yi & David J. Pine

Authors
  1. Étienne Ducrot
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  2. Mingxin He
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Contributions

E.D., G.-R.Y. and D.J.P. conceived of the experimental and computational approach. E.D. performed the experiments and ran the simulations. M.H. synthesized the colloidal clusters. D.J.P. and E.D. wrote the paper with edits by G.-R.Y.

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Correspondence to Gi-Ra Yi or David J. Pine.

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Ducrot, É., He, M., Yi, GR. et al. Colloidal alloys with preassembled clusters and spheres. Nature Mater 16, 652–657 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4869

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