Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 112, Issue 17, Pages 5286-5290Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1415467112
Keywords
superballs; phase behavior; dense packings; depletion interactions; Monte Carlo simulations
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation MRSEC Program at The University of Chicago [NSF DMR-MRSEC 1420709]
- A. P. Sloan Foundation
- Packard Foundation
- Agentschap NL [FND07002]
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) [EP/I036192/1]
- NASA [NNX08AK04G]
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/I036192/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- EPSRC [EP/I036192/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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Guiding the self-assembly of materials by controlling the shape of the individual particle constituents is a powerful approach to material design. We show that colloidal silica superballs crystallize into canted phases in the presence of depletants. Some of these phases are consistent with the so-called Lambda(1) lattice that was recently predicted as the densest packing of superdisks. As the size of the depletant is reduced, however, we observe a transition to a square phase. The differences in these entropically stabilized phases result from an interplay between the size of the depletants and the fine structure of the superball shape. We find qualitative agreement of our experimental results both with a phase diagram computed on the basis of the volume accessible to the depletants and with simulations. By using a mixture of depletants, one of which is thermosensitive, we induce solid-to-solid phase transitions between square and canted structures. The use of depletant size to leverage fine features of the shape of particles in driving their self-assembly demonstrates a general and powerful mechanism for engineering novel materials.
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