Assembling Ordered Crystals with Disperse Building Blocks.

ABSTRACT: Conventional colloidal crystallization techniques typically require low dispersity building blocks in order to make ordered particle arrays, resulting in a practical challenge for studying or scaling these materials. Nanoparticles covered in a polymer brush therefore may be predicted to be challenging building blocks in the formation of high-quality particle superlattices, as both the nanoparticle core and polymer brush are independent sources of dispersity in the system. However, when supramolecular bonding between complementary functional groups at the ends of the polymer chains are used to drive particle assembly, these "nanocomposite tectons" can make high quality superlattices with polymer dispersities as large as 1.44 and particle diameter relative standard deviations up to 23% witho

SUBMITTER: Santos PJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6727666 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature