Physics – Condensed Matter – Soft Condensed Matter
Scientific paper
2012-01-16
Physics
Condensed Matter
Soft Condensed Matter
Scientific paper
The rapid progress in designing the surface decoration of patchy colloidal particles offers a new, yet unexperienced freedom to create building entities for larger, more complex structures in soft matter systems. However, it is difficult to predict the large variety of ordered equilibrium structures that these particles are able to undergo under the variation of external parameters, such as temperature or pressure. Here we show that, by a novel combination of two theoretical tools, it is indeed possible to predict the self-assembly scenario of patchy colloidal particles: on one hand, a reliable and efficient optimization tool based on ideas of evolutionary algorithms helps to identify the ordered equilibrium structures to be expected at T = 0; on the other hand, suitable simulation techniques allow to estimate via free energy calculations the phase diagram at finite temperature. We demonstrate the power of this approach by identifying a broad variety of emerging self-assembly scenarios for a simple example of spherical colloids with four patches and we investigate the stability of the crystal structures on perturbing in a controlled way the regular tetrahedral arrangement of the patches.
Bianchi Eugenio
Doppelbauer G.
Kahl Gerhard
Noya Eva G.
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