Surveying the Free Energy Landscape of Attractive Colloidal Spheres

Controlling the assembly of colloidal particles into specific structures has been a long-term goal in the soft materials community. Much can be learned from the process from the self-assembly by examining the early .stage assembly into clusters. For the simple case of hard-spheres with short-range attractions, the small-N rigid structures have been enumerated theoretically and tested experimentally. Less is known, however, about how the free energy landscapes are altered when the interparticle potential is long-ranged. In this work, we demonstrate how adaptive biasing in molecular simulations may be used to pinpoint shifts in the stability of colloidal clusters as the interparticle potential is varied. We also discuss the generality of our techniques and strategies for applications to related molecule systems.