Enhanced Porosity in Self-Assembled Morphologies Mediated by Charged Lobes on Patchy Particles.

Colloidal patchy particles are particles with anisotropic "patches" decorating their surfaces. Several properties of these patches including their size, number, location, and interactions provide control over self-assembly of patchy particles into structures with desired properties. We report on simulation studies of particles where patches take the form of lobes. Based on the number and locations of lobes, these particles have different shapes (trigonal planar, square planar, tetrahedral, trigonal bipyramidal, and octahedral). We investigated the effect of incorporating charges on the lobes in achieving porous self-assembled morphologies across a range of temperatures. We observed that an increase in the charge on the lobe resulted in lobed particles assembling over a wider range of temperatures. We also observed that the lobed particles with charges self-assembled into structures with enhanced porosity in comparison to lobed particles without charges.