Abstract
Understanding and controlling self-assembly processes at multiple length scales is vital if we are to design and create advanced materials. In particular, our ability to organise matter on the nanoscale has advanced considerably, but still lags far behind our skill in manipulating individual molecules. New tools allowing controlled nanoscale assembly are sorely needed, as well as the physical understanding of how they work. Here, we report such a method for the production of highly anisotropic nanoparticles with controlled dimensions based on a morphological transformation process (MORPH, for short) driven by the formation of supramolecular bonds. We present a minimal physical model for MORPH that suggests a general mechanism which is potentially applicable to a large number of polymer/nanoparticle systems. We envision MORPH becoming a valuable tool for controlling nanoscale self-assembly, and for the production of functional nanostructures for diverse applications.
Highlights
Understanding and controlling self-assembly processes at multiple length scales is vital if we are to design and create advanced materials
We first encountered the possibility for Morphological transformation (MORPH) while investigating the self-assembly behaviour of nucleobase-containing polymers[30,31,32,33,34,35,36], in a nanoparticle system that exhibited poorly controlled shape-changing behaviour in response to the addition of a polymer in solution
We reasoned that achieving this control would result in a useful approach to the generation of welldefined anisotropic nanoparticles and hypothesised that these previous efforts had not succeeded because of nanoparticle disassembly/reassembly during the transformation process, which led to the formation of a range of structures of different sizes
Summary
Understanding and controlling self-assembly processes at multiple length scales is vital if we are to design and create advanced materials. New tools allowing controlled nanoscale assembly are sorely needed, as well as the physical understanding of how they work We report such a method for the production of highly anisotropic nanoparticles with controlled dimensions based on a morphological transformation process (MORPH, for short) driven by the formation of supramolecular bonds. While the self-assembly of polymers in solution affords bottom-up access to nanoscale objects[16], controlling this process to make highly anisotropic nanoparticles with welldefined dimensions has proven to be very challenging This is because conventional methods rely on exploiting differences in the stabilities of particles with different shapes, which are not significant between high aspect ratio structures of different lengths[17]. Seeded growth has so far proven limited to a narrow range of polymers and depends on the generation of a uniform population of anisotropic seed particles, which can be a major challenge
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