Abstract
Colloidal self-assembly has enormous potential as a bottom-up means of structure fabrication. Here we demonstrate hierarchical self-assembly of rationally designed charge-stabilised colloidal magnetic particles into ground state structures that are topologically equivalent to a snub cube and a snub dodecahedron, the only two chiral Archimedean solids, for size-selected clusters. These spherical structures open up in response to an external magnetic field and demonstrate controllable porosity. Such features are critical to their applications as functional materials.
Highlights
Colloidal self-assembly has enormous potential as a bottom-up means of structure fabrication
We demonstrate hierarchical self-assembly of rationally designed charge-stabilised colloidal magnetic particles into ground state structures that are topologically equivalent to a snub cube and a snub dodecahedron, the only two chiral Archimedean solids, for size-selected clusters
Colloidal building blocks are appealing from this perspective,[13,14] examples of colloidal self-assembly into target structures via a priori designed building blocks are still rather limited.[15,16,17]
Summary
In order to facilitate the formation of triangular motifs, we focused on spherical charge-stabilised colloidal magnetic particles, where a dipole is embedded at a location shifted away from the centre Such building blocks resemble closely the colloidal magnetic particles, realised recently using an iron oxide inclusion buried below the surface of an organosilica polymer sphere, that formed planar trimers upon tuning the electrostatic repulsion.[26] Our building block carries an off-centred dipole pointing radially outward.[42,43] Here our results demonstrate hierarchical selfassembly of these colloidal building blocks into ground state structures that are topologically equivalent to a snub cube and a snub dodecahedron, the only two chiral Archimedean solids, for size-selected clusters.
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