2015/09/21 by Aleks Reinhardt, Chon Pan Ho, Daan Frenkel
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced biosensing and bioanalysis techniques #Block Copolymer Self-Assembly #Lattice (music) #Molecular dynamics #Monte Carlo method #Nucleation #Supersaturation #Surface Chemistry and Catalysis #Tetrahedron #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.soft #physics.chem-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1039/c5fd00135h
published as Faraday Discuss. 186, 215-228 (2016) · Faraday Discussions 2015
arxiv created 2015/09/21 · openalex publication_date 2015/09/21 · arxiv updated 2016/04/18 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We report canonical and grand-canonical lattice Monte Carlo simulations of the self-assembly of addressable structures comprising hundreds of distinct component types. The nucleation behaviour, in the form of free-energy barriers to nucleation, changes significantly as the co-ordination number of the building blocks is changed from 4 to 8 to 12. Unlike tetrahedral structures - which roughly correspond to DNA bricks that have been studied in experiments - the shapes of the free-energy barriers of higher co-ordination structures depend strongly on the supersaturation, and such structures require a very significant driving force for structure growth before nucleation becomes thermally accessible. Although growth at high supersaturation results in more defects during self-assembly, we show that high co-ordination number structures can still be assembled successfully in computer simulations and that they exhibit self-assembly behaviour analogous to DNA bricks. In particular, the self-assembly remains modular, enabling in principle a wide variety of nanostructures to be assembled, with a greater spatial resolution than is possible in low co-ordination structures.