Assembly of planar chiral superlattices from achiral building blocks
AssigneeWilliam Marsh Rice University
InventorsMatthew R Jones, Zhihua Cheng, Yuchen Xing
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Abstract
The spontaneous assembly of chiral structures from building blocks that lack chirality is fundamentally important for colloidal chemistry and has implications for the formation of advanced optical materials. Here, we find that purified achiral gold tetrahedron-shaped nanoparticles assemble into two-dimensional superlattices that exhibit planar chirality under a balance of repulsive electrostatic and attractive van der Waals and depletion forces. A model accounting for these interactions shows that the growth of planar structures is kinetically preferred over similar three-dimensional products, explaining their selective formation.
Claims8
A composition of matter comprising purified achiral gold tetrahedron-shaped nanoparticles assembled into two-dimensional superlattices that exhibit planar chirality under a balance of repulsive electrostatic and attractive van der Waals and depletion forces.
A method for forming a composition of matter comprising purified achiral gold tetrahedron-shaped nanoparticles assembled into two-dimensional superlattices that exhibit planar chirality under a balance of repulsive electrostatic and attractive van der Waals and depletion forces, the method comprising the steps:
- synthesizing gold (Au) seeds;
- synthesizing gold tetrahedra (Au Td) nanoparticles from said synthesized gold (Au) seeds;
- overgrowing the synthesized gold tetrahedra (Au Td) nanoparticles with silver (Ag) cubes;
- purifying the gold tetrahedra nanoparticles in the silver cubes (Au Td@Ag);
- removing the Ag cube on purified Au Td@Ag cube nanoparticles through selective etching;
- and
- assembling the gold tetrahedra (Au Td) nanoparticles on a support member to form a two-dimensional superlattices.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.