Journal
NATURE MATERIALS
Volume 14, Issue 1, Pages 56-60Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/NMAT4072
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- FOM programme Control over Functional Nanoparticle Solids (FNPS)
- 'Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek' (NWO) CW grant
- NWO-VICI grant
- NWO-CW-Echo grant
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Icosahedral symmetry, which is not compatible with truly long-range order, canbefoundinmany systems, such as liquids, glasses, atomic clusters, quasicrystals and virus-capsids(1-12). To obtain arrangements with a high degree of icosahedral order from tens of particles or more, interparticle attractive interactions are considered to be essential(1,3,6-12). Here, we report that entropy and spherical confinement suffice for the formation of icosahedral clusters consisting of up to 100,000 particles. Specifically, by using real-space measurements on nanometre- and micrometre-sized colloids, as well as computer simulations, we show that tens of thousands of hard spheres compressed under spherical confinement spontaneously crystallize into icosahedral clusters that are entropically favoured over the bulk face-centred cubic crystal structure(13,14). Our findings provide insights into the interplay between confinement and crystallization and into how these are connected to the formation of icosahedral structures.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available