Mac Fhionnlaoich, Niamh;
Schrettl, Stephen;
Tito, Nicholas B;
Yang, Ye;
Nair, Malavika;
Serrano, Luis A;
Harkness, Kellen;
... Guldin, Stefan; + view all
(2023)
Reversible Microscale Assembly of Nanoparticles Driven by the Phase Transition of a Thermotropic Liquid Crystal.
ACS Nano
10.1021/acsnano.2c09203.
(In press).
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Abstract
The arrangement of nanoscale building blocks into patterns with microscale periodicity is challenging to achieve via self-assembly processes. Here, we report on the phase-transition-driven collective assembly of gold nanoparticles in a thermotropic liquid crystal. A temperature-induced transition from the isotropic to the nematic phase under anchoring-driven planar alignment leads to the assembly of individual nanometer-sized particles into arrays of micrometer-sized agglomerates, whose size and characteristic spacing can be tuned by varying the cooling rate. Phase field simulations coupling the conserved and nonconserved order parameters exhibit a similar evolution of the morphology as the experimental observations. This fully reversible process offers control over structural order on the microscopic level and is an interesting model system for the programmable and reconfigurable patterning of nanocomposites with access to micrometer-sized periodicities.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Reversible Microscale Assembly of Nanoparticles Driven by the Phase Transition of a Thermotropic Liquid Crystal |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1021/acsnano.2c09203 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.2c09203 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023 The Authors. Published by American Chemical Society. This is an open access author accepted manuscript under the CC BY 4.0 license Attribution 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) |
| Keywords: | hierarchical, liquid crystals, nanoparticles, phase transition, self-assembly, soft matter |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Chemical Engineering |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10171487 |
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