Motivated by growing interest in the self-assembly of nanoparticles for applications such as photonics, organic photovoltaics, and DNA-assisted designer crystals, we explore the phase behavior of tethered spherical nanoparticles. Here, a polymer tether is used to geometrically constrain a pair of nanoparticles creating a tethered nanoparticle "telechelic". Using simulation, we examine how varying architectural features, such as the size ratio of the two end-group nanospheres and the length of the flexible tether, affects the self-assembled morphologies. We demonstrate not only that this hybrid building block maintains the same phase diversity as linear triblock copolymers, allowing for a variety of nanoparticle materials to replace polymer blocks, but also that new structures not previously reported are accessible. Our findings imply a robust underlying ordering mechanism is common among these systems, thus allowing flexibility in synthesis approaches to achieve a target morphology. © 2014 American Chemical Society.
CITATION STYLE
Marson, R. L., Phillips, C. L., Anderson, J. A., & Glotzer, S. C. (2014). Phase behavior and complex crystal structures of self-assembled tethered nanoparticle telechelics. Nano Letters, 14(4), 2071–2078. https://doi.org/10.1021/nl500236b
Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.