Temperature-Controlled Reconfigurable Nanoparticle Binary Superlattices. Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The presence of diffusionless transformations during the assembly of DNA-functionalized particles (DFPs) is highly significant in designing reconfigurable materials whose structure and functional properties are tunable with controllable variables. In this paper, we first use a variety of computational models and techniques (including free energy methods) to address the nature of such transformations between face-centered cubic (FCC) and body-centered cubic (BCC) structures in a three-dimensional binary system of multiflavored DFPs. We find that the structural rearrangements between BCC and FCC structures are thermodynamically reversible and dependent on crystallite size. Smaller nuclei favor nonclose-packed BCC structures, whereas close-packed FCC structures are observed during the growth stage once the crystallite size exceeds a threshold value. Importantly, we show that a similar reversible transformation between BCC/FCC structures can be driven by changing temperature without introducing additional solution components, highlighting the feasibility of creating reconfigurable crystalline materials. Lastly, we validate this thermally responsive switching behavior in a DFP system with explicit DNA (un)hybridization, demonstrating our findings' applicability to experimentally realizable systems.

published proceedings

  • ACS Nano

altmetric score

  • 7.3

author list (cited authors)

  • Mao, R., Pretti, E., & Mittal, J.

citation count

  • 3

complete list of authors

  • Mao, Runfang||Pretti, Evan||Mittal, Jeetain

publication date

  • May 2021