Isabela Quintela Matos

Self-assembling of nonadditive mixtures of patchy particles with engineerable energetic and entropic interactions

Mixtures of hybridizing grafted DNA or DNA-like strands nanoparticles have been of particular interest in the recent literature because a complex type of self-assembly behavior would be accessible if these NP-NP interactions could be designed to give nonadditive mixing. The effects of no-additive mixing result in no trivial phase behavior in molecular fluids. However, it is rare for colloidal/nanoparticle materials, so we wanted to explore the possible nontrivial phase behavior that may occur in a colloidal mixture that presents nonadditivity mixing. For this purpose, we used NPs with grafted raised patches that interact through an inter-particle potential that represents DNA hybridization and is nonadditive. We observed a variety of network phases (gyroid, cylinder, honeycomb, and single diamond). Our results also show the influence of the number of patches and their placement on the resulting phase.