Annealing cycles and the self-organization of functionalized colloids

Abstract

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 σ). We use analytical arguments to show that the scaling results from the statistics of a random walk in configurational space.arXiv:1710.02373v1 [cond-mat.soft] 6 Oct 2017Annealing cycles and the self-organization of functionalized colloids 2

Crossover from three- to six-fold symmetry of colloidal aggregates in circular traps

“…related to the typical time taken by a particle to diffuse in an area d 2 p , considering an overdamped regime [46]. All results are averages over (i) 10 different realizations and (ii) all traps in each realization.…”

“…The results reported above suggest the design of a device, where the symmetry of the aggregates may be dynamically switched from three to six fold through the width of the potential traps. The effectiveness of such a device, however, depends on how the rate of the symmetry change compares to the different timescales involved, namely those related to bond breaking/formation and rotational/translational diffusion [46,49]. We considered time dependent trap widths, as shown in Fig.…”

Percolation of functionalized colloids on patterned substrates

“…Finally, we have focused on equilibrium properties. Some of the phenomenology described here might be dynamically inaccessible due to the formation of kinetically trapped structures [9,31,54,55]. Analyzing the dynamics on patterned substrates is therefore a fundamental question of practical interest that should be considered in future works.…”

Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Active Matter using LAMMPS

“…The conversion between real units and reduced units can be done by using the relations in Table I. For instance, Soft For Langevin Dynamics simulations it is sometimes clearer to use the Brownian time [14] (time for a particle to diffuse the square of its diameter) to set the timescale.…”