Annealing cycles and the self-organization of functionalized colloids

TL;DR

This paper investigates how annealing cycles influence the self-assembly of functionalized colloids, revealing that the optimal frequency depends on interaction strength and can be understood through random walk statistics in configurational space.

Contribution

It provides a numerical and analytical study of annealing cycle effects on colloid self-assembly, highlighting the frequency dependence related to interaction strength.

Findings

Optimal annealing frequency varies with interaction strength.

Self-assembly efficiency is improved by tuning annealing cycles.

Scaling behavior explained by random walk statistics.

Abstract

The self-assembly of functionalized (patchy) particles with directional interactions into target structures is still a challenge, despite the significant experimental advances on their synthesis. The self-assembly pathways are typically characterized by high energy barriers that hinder the access to stable (equilibrium) structures. A possible strategy to tackle this challenge is to perform annealing cycles. By periodically switching on and off the inter-particle bonds, one expects to smooth-out the kinetic pathways and favor the assembly of targeted structures. Preliminary results have shown that the efficiency of annealing cycles depends strongly on their frequency. Here, we study numerically how this frequency-dependence scales with the strength of the directional interactions (size of the patch $\sigma$). We use analytical arguments to show that the scaling results from the statistics of a random walk in configurational space.