University of Cambridge, Cavendish Laboratory, JJ Thomson Avenue, Cambridge CB3 0HE, UK.
Nat Commun. 2013;4:2007. doi: 10.1038/ncomms3007.
Equilibrium self-assembly relies on the relaxation of disordered mixtures of building blocks towards an ordered ground state. The main drawback of this traditional approach lies in the kinetic traps that often interrupt the progression of the system towards equilibrium and lead to the formation of arrested phases. The latest techniques to control colloidal interactions open up the possibility of exploiting the tendency to dynamically arrest in order to construct amorphous materials with a specific morphology and local separation between multiple components. Here we propose strategies to direct the gelation of two-component colloidal mixtures by sequentially activating selective interactions. We investigate morphological changes in the structure of the arrested phases both by means of molecular dynamics simulations and experimentally by using DNA-coated colloids. Our approach can be exploited to assemble multicomponent mesoporous materials with possible applications in hybrid photovoltaics, photonics and drug delivery.
平衡自组装依赖于构建块无规混合物朝着有序基态的弛豫。这种传统方法的主要缺点在于动力学陷阱，这些陷阱经常中断系统向平衡的进展，并导致形成被捕获的相。控制胶体相互作用的最新技术开辟了利用动态捕获的趋势来构建具有特定形态和多个组件之间局部分离的无定形材料的可能性。在这里，我们提出了通过顺序激活选择性相互作用来指导两成分胶体混合物胶凝的策略。我们通过分子动力学模拟和使用 DNA 包覆胶体的实验来研究被捕获相的结构的形态变化。我们的方法可用于组装多组分介孔材料，其在混合光伏、光子学和药物输送中可能有应用。
