Dielectric effects in the self-assembly of binary colloidal aggregates

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new computational method to account for dielectric effects in colloidal self-assembly, revealing that these effects significantly influence the resulting structures, including unexpected colloidal strings.

Contribution

The study presents an efficient technique to model polarization charges in dynamical dielectric environments, highlighting the importance of dielectric effects in colloidal self-assembly.

Findings

Dielectric effects qualitatively change predicted self-assembled structures.

Many-body effects lead to surprising colloidal string formations.

Neglecting dielectric effects can overlook key structural phenomena.

Abstract

Electrostatic interactions play an important role in numerous self-assembly phenomena, including colloidal aggregation. Although colloids typically have a dielectric constant that differs from the surrounding solvent, the effective interactions that arise from inhomogeneous polarization charge distributions are generally neglected in theoretical and computational studies. We introduce an efficient technique to resolve polarization charges in dynamical dielectric geometries, and demonstrate that dielectric effects \emph{qualitatively} alter the predicted self-assembled structures, with surprising colloidal strings arising from many-body effects.