(420b) Nanoparticle Directed Assembly Using Electric Fields

Nanoparticles are exceptionally promising components for engineering advanced functional materials and devices – this potential arises from their distinct chemical and physical functionalities (optical, electronic, catalytic, etc.) that stem from their near-atomic nature and collective behavior when particles come together into a coherent spatial organization. Such organization may be an equilibrium or non-equilibrium structure. Engineering nanoparticle assembly across a wide hierarchy of length scales, spaning orders of magnitude, from nanometers to macroscopic dimensions, is the key barrier towards harnessing this transformational technology. Fortunately, the combined use of sophisticated particles that encode self-assembly information through shape or interactions with directing fields, such as fluid flow and electromagnetic fields, has proven to be an effective organizing principle [1,2]. Directed self-assembly has the potential to produce functional structures with novel properties while retaining the essential features of a highly scalable, bottom-up fabrication process. In this talk, I will discuss recent examples of nanoparticle assembly, focusing on the use of directing electric fields to achieve close-packed structures encoded by the constituent nanoparticle shape.

1. Glotzer, S. C. and Solomon, M. J. Nat. Mater. 6, 557–562 (2007).

2. Grzelczak, M., Vermant, J., Furst, E. M. and Liz-Marzán, L. M. ACS Nano 4, 3591–3605 (2010).