China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
*
Published in Luis Liz-Marzán, Colloidal Synthesis of Plasmonic Nanometals, 2020
Denis Rodríguez-Fernández, Luis M. Liz-Marzán
The tremendous recent development in the production of isotropic nanomaterials has provided access to nanoparticles with pre-selected composition, shape, size and functionality. Beyond the multiple applications found for these nanostructured materials, the early work by Casagrande et al. and subsequently De Gennes’ Nobel lecture, opened the way for exploring new types of particles comprising multiple compositions and functionalities.[1,2] Patchy particles can be defined as particles with one or more well-defined patches, displaying strongly anisotropic and directional interactions.[3] Janus particles (named after the two-faced Roman god Janus) can be considered as a special type of patchy particles with only one patch that covers half of the particle. Having different properties at opposite sides enables these particles to mimic the behavior of surfactant molecules, leading to completely new self-assembled structures, with many more possibilities than those found in isotropic particles. Such possibilities rely on a strict control over the balanced forces involved in colloidal stability, to form clusters with predefined size, shape and properties.[4–6]
Pre-programmed Self-assembly
Published in Klaus D. Sattler, st Century Nanoscience – A Handbook, 2019
Carlos I. Mendoza, Daniel Salgado-Blanco
By properly designing the patch shape and symmetry, patchy particles can crystallize in a specified target morphology. The location and size of the patches assures that the minimum energy configuration at zero temperature is precisely the desired structure. Figure 12.3 shows patchy particles and their assembly into three different crystalline lattices (square, honeycomb, and Kagomé), with two possible designs of patchy particles to assemble the Kagomé lattice (Romano and Sciortino 2011). The second alternative for the Kagomé lattice has been experimentally validated at the microscale (Chen, Bae and Granick 2011).
Structure and equation-of-state of a disordered system of shape anisotropic patchy particles
Published in Molecular Physics, 2019
Patchy particles, i.e. colloids that are decorated on their otherwise spherical (or circular) surface by regions of repulsion or attraction have been subject of a steadily increasing number of experimental and theoretical investigations during the past one to two decades. This remarkable interest in these particles is to a considerable amount due to the fact that patchy particles can meanwhile be synthesised with essentially arbitrary patch decorations in terms of number, positions, and spatial extent of the patches. They have therefore become very versatile units in bottom-up self-assembly strategies of soft matter based functional materials. Reviews over and special issues dedicated to patchy particles covering both experiment and theory provide an excellent overview over this rapidly expanding field [1–4].
Employing multi-GPU power for molecular dynamics simulation: an extension of GALAMOST
Published in Molecular Physics, 2018
You-Liang Zhu, Deng Pan, Zhan-Wei Li, Hong Liu, Hu-Jun Qian, Yang Zhao, Zhong-Yuan Lu, Zhao-Yan Sun
Recently, we have developed a versatile model for soft patchy particles with various patch arrangements on the basis of previous anisotropic soft particle model [59]. It is a simple and general mesoscale soft patchy particle model, which can felicitously describe the deformable and surface-anisotropic characteristics of soft patchy particles. This model can be used in dynamics simulations to investigate the aggregation behaviour and mechanism of various types of soft patchy particles with tunable number, size, direction, and geometrical arrangement of the patches. Although the model is originally proposed to study soft patchy particles with a harmonic repulsion to describe volume exclusion, the model can also be applied to describe hard patchy particles with steep repulsive interactions.