Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 106, Issue 48, Pages 20164-20167Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906676106
Keywords
anisotropic interactions; columnar arrangements; helix; self-assembly
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Funding
- Oppenheimer Fund
- Gates Cambridge Trust
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Nature has mastered the art of creating complex structures through self-assembly of simpler building blocks. Adapting such a bottom-up view provides a potential route to the fabrication of novel materials. However, this approach suffers from the lack of a sufficiently detailed understanding of the noncovalent forces that hold the self-assembled structures together. Here we demonstrate that nature can indeed guide us, as we explore routes to helicity with achiral building blocks driven by the interplay between two competing length scales for the interactions, as in DNA. By characterizing global minima for clusters, we illustrate several realizations of helical architecture, the simplest one involving ellipsoids of revolution as building blocks. In particular, we show that axially symmetric soft discoids can self-assemble into helical columnar arrangements. Understanding the molecular origin of such spatial organisation has important implications for the rational design of materials with useful optoelectronic applications.
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