Advances in Colloidal Building Blocks: Toward Patchy Colloidal Clusters

Abstract

The scalable synthetic route to colloidal atoms has significantly advanced over the past two decades. Recently, colloidal clusters with DNA‐coated cores called “patchy colloidal clusters” have been developed, providing a directional bonding with specific angle of rotation due to the shape complementarity between colloidal clusters. Through a DNA‐mediated interlocking process, they are directly assembled into low‐coordination colloidal structures, such as cubic diamond lattices. Herein, the significant progress in recent years in the synthesis of patchy colloidal clusters and their assembly in experiments and simulations is reviewed. Furthermore, an outlook is given on the emerging approaches to the patchy colloidal clusters and their potential applications in photonic crystals, metamaterials, topological photonic insulators, and separation membranes.

Programmed Self‐Assembly of Single Colloidal Gyroids for Chiral Photonic Crystals

“…We envisage the self-assembly routes to single colloidal gyroid established here to drive the field of colloidal self-assembly with the exploration of novel optical effects, emerging from a complex interplay of chirality, photonics and topology. [3,4,23,35,36] This work thus paves the way for new self-assembly routes toward building chiral and topological devices operating at optical frequencies, [5,37] as well as emulating nature's design of chiral photonic structures. [38,39]…”

Molecular Engineering of Colloidal Atoms

“…[4] However, our pursuit of inventing arbitrary assemblies necessitates interparticle binding which mimics covalent bonds bearing directionality and saturability to further refine the position and number of particles in three dimensions. [5] As a result, massive efforts have been devoted to the directional self-assembly of individual particles into discrete clusters adopting molecules' spatial configuration to imitate the bonding behavior of atoms. This promotes the germination of various colloidal scale analogs of Creation of architectures with exquisite hierarchies actuates the germination of revolutionized functions and applications across a wide range of fields.…”

“…The term of "colloidal molecules" has been reviewed in different aspects in early [2a,9] and recent literatures. [5,7,10] Duguet et al reviewed the synthesis, assembly, and complementary interrelationship of patchy particles and colloidal molecules. [7] Sacanna et al introduced the concept of total synthesis and summarized the interand intraparticle reactions utilized to build colloidal matter.…”

“…[10] Recently, Yi et al reviewed the development of microscale colloidal clusters, spherical patchy particles, and patchy colloidal clusters, and discussed their assembly into superstructures in both experiments and simulations. [5] To avoid overlap with previous works, this review focuses on the designing principles in creating microscale and nanoscale "colloidal atoms" and their controlled organization into "colloidal molecules," i.e., "molecular engineering of colloidal atoms." On the basis of the driving motifs used to guide interparticle association, we divided the pioneering strategies into four categories: template-assisted, ligand-mediated, anisotropy-regulated, and selfregulated/adaptive assembly.…”

Self Assembly of Patchy Anisotropic Particle Forming Free Standing Monolayer Film

“…To engineer materials with specific properties through selfassembly the patchy colloidal particle are considered as ideal building blocks. [12,13] Patchy particle usually have a hard core component with decorated patches on the surface. [12,14] The hard core component can have be symmetric shape like the sphere [12] or asymmetric shape like ellipsoids, [15] rods, [16] 2D structure, [17] etc.…”