Dresden 2011 – scientific programme

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MA: Fachverband Magnetismus

MA 17: SKM Dissertation Prize

MA 17.3: Invited Talk

Tuesday, March 15, 2011, 11:30–12:00, TRE Ma

Playing with Nano-LEGO: Self-Assembly of Patchy Particles — •Daniela Kraft — Van ’t Hoff Laboratory for Physical and Colloid Chemistry, Debye Institute for NanoMaterials Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

Self-assembly of colloidal particles into larger structures bears potential for creating materials with unprecedented properties, such as full photonic band gaps in the visible spectrum. For such self-assembly, uniform colloids are quite limited as building blocks since their shape is the only control parameter. Much more promising in this respect are colloids with site-specific attractions. However, so far such ’patchy’ colloids have only been studied in computero as their attainment in the laboratory has proven to be quite a challenge. Here we report two novel experimental realizations of patchy particles, focusing in particular on the simplest case of colloids with one patch only. These building blocks are used to built up new colloidal structures in solution, analogous to a ’Nano-LEGO’. The intriguing similarities between the obtained colloidal assemblies and models for molecules or surfactant micelles are discussed. We quantify the latter by employing a theoretical micelle model and compare our results to Monte Carlo and Molecular Dynamics simulations.