Theoretical Sciences Unit Seminar - 8 August 2022

Speaker Event

Speaker: Dr. Dwaipayan Chakrabarti

Affiliation: University of Birmingham, UK

Date: 08 August 2022 (Monday)

Time: 11:00 AM

Tea/Coffee: 10:45 AM

Venue: Kanada Auditorium, JNCASR

Title: Social Distancing in Colloidal Crystals

Abstract:

Colloidal open crystals — sparsely populated periodic structures, comprising low-coordinated colloidal particles — are attractive targets for self-assembly because of their variety of applications, for example, as photonic materials, phononic and mechanical metamaterials, as well as porous media [1-4].

Colloidal particles in their primitive form offer short-range isotropic interactions and thus tend to form close-packed structures. Despite remarkable advances over the last two decades in the synthesis of designer colloidal particles, interacting via anisotropic and/or specific interactions [5,6], programming self-assembly of colloidal particles into open crystals has proved elusive because of issues concerning both thermodynamics and kinetics.

In this presentation, I will establish a number of rationally designed self-assembly schemes for patchy particles with decorated surfaces that address these issues to efficiently yield in silico a variety of colloidal open crystals, especially those much sought-after as photonic crystals [7-10]. In particular, I will demonstrate how the selection of certain even-member rings formed along the assembly pathways is critical to improving the kinetics of self-assembly of these colloidal open crystals [8-10]. I will discuss how our design rules, while hewing closely to current experimental constraints, alleviate issues that have impeded the success of colloidal self-assembly as a scalable fabrication route to photonic crystals [9].