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Hierarchical Self-Assembly of Asymmetric Amphiphatic Spherical Colloidal Particles

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 Added by William Miller III
 Publication date 2009
  fields Physics
and research's language is English




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From dumbbells to FCC crystals, we study the self-assembly pathway of amphiphatic, spherical colloidal particles as a function of the size of the hydrophobic region using molecular dynamics simulations. Specifically, we analyze how local inter-particle interactions correlate to the final self-assembled aggregate and how they affect the dynamical pathway of structure formation. We present a detailed diagram separating the many phases that we find for different sizes of the hydrophobic area, and uncover a narrow region where particles self-assemble into hollow, faceted cages that could potentially find interesting engineering applications.



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