Self-Assembly of Patchy Particles into Diamond Structures through Molecular Mimicry

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that patchy particles with specific interactions can self-assemble into diamond structures, advancing the design of photonic crystals through simulation of molecular mimicry.

Contribution

The study introduces a simulation approach showing how patchy particles can form diamond lattices, including seeding and rotational interactions to facilitate assembly.

Findings

Patchy particles can self-assemble into diamond structures.

Seeding with small crystallites enhances assembly.

Rotational interactions mimic covalent bonds.

Abstract

Fabrication of diamond structures by self-assembly is a fundamental challenge in making three-dimensional photonic crystals. We simulate a system of model hard particles with attractive patches and show that they can self-assemble into a diamond structure from an initially disordered state. We quantify the extent to which the formation of the diamond structure can be facilitated by "seeding" the system with small diamond crystallites or by introducing a rotation interaction to mimic a carbon-carbon antibonding interaction. Our results suggest patchy particles may serve as colloidal "atoms" and "molecules" for the bottom-up self-assembly of three-dimensional crystals.