Self-assembly of mesophases and zeolitic crystals from nanoparticles

Recent years have seen an explosion in the number of crystalline and quasi-crystalline structures formed by assembly of nanoparticles. To date, however, it has been difficult to assemble nanoparticles into mesophases such as those formed by block copolymers and surfactants. This presentation will discuss recent work in which we demonstrate that simulations of binary mixtures of unbound particles with simple short ranged pair interactions produce the same mesophases as block copolymers and surfactants, including lamellar, hexagonal, gyroid, body-centered cubic, face-centered cubic, perforated lamellar, and semicrystalline phases [Kumar and Molinero, J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2017, 8, 5053-5058]. We will further discuss how the addition of anisotropic interactions to one type of particle in the mixture can result in the fast formation of zeolitic crystals, and the role of the mesophases in facilitating the formation of almost defect-free complex structures. The experimental realization of the interparticle interactions of this work would provide a distinc route to produce complex zeolitic crystals and liquid crystalline mesophases from nanoparticles.