Self-assembly of active core corona particles into highly ordered and self-healing structures.

Abstract

Formation of highly ordered structures usually needs to overcome a high free-energy barrier that is greatly beyond the ability of thermodynamic fluctuation such that the system would be easily trapped into a state with many defects and the annealing process of which often occurs on unreachable long time scales. Here, we report theoretically a fascinating example that active core corona particles can successfully self-assemble into a large-scaled and highly ordered stripe or trimer lattice, which is hardly achieved in a nondriven equilibrium system. Besides, such an activity-induced ordered structure shows an interesting self-healing feature of defects. In addition, there exists an optimal level of activity that most favorably enhances the formation of ordered self-assembly structures. Since core corona particles act as important units for self-assembly in real practice, we believe that our study opens a new design-strategy for highly ordered materials.