Highlights
Self-assembly of nanocrystal checkerboard patterns

What Has Been Achieved: The assembly of checkerboard lattices from colloidal nanocrystals that harness the effects of multiple, coupled physical forces at disparate length scales (interfacial, interparticle, and intermolecular) and that do not rely on chemical binding.

Importance of the Achievement: Checkerboard lattices—where the resulting structure is open, porous, and highly symmetric—are difficult to create by self-assembly. The successful feedback loop between molecular dynamics simulations and interfacial assembly experiments is critical for targeting these lattices, which represent a tiny fraction of the phase space associated with the polymer-grafted nanocrystals used in these experiments.

Relation to the IRG1: This discovery has validated IRG1’s original hypothesis that computational efforts can be used to discover, design, and target self-assembled nanocrystal mesophases.

Nature Communications 2024, 15, 3913. DOI : 10.1038/s41467-024-47572-2

Self-assembly of checkerboard mesophase from Ag nanocrystals. (a) Coarse-grained model of air/water interface and bi-grafted NCs, where the water layer is shown in fluorescent green, the polymer ligands are shown in green, the alkyl ligands are shown in blue, and the NC cores are shown as cubic lattices of gray beads. Structural phase diagram as a function of overall graft density. Phases labeled by asterisks are experimentally achieved through modifying ligand concentration in feedstock. (b) SEM image of the mesophase obtained with Ag NCs post-synthetically modified with a feedstock mixture of 50 µM PEG20k-SH and 6 µM C16-SH. Scale bar = 500 nm, inset = 100 nm
Self-assembly of checkerboard mesophase from Ag nanocrystals. (a) Coarse-grained model of air/water interface and bi-grafted NCs, where the water layer is shown in fluorescent green, the polymer ligands are shown in green, the alkyl ligands are shown in blue, and the NC cores are shown as cubic lattices of gray beads. Structural phase diagram as a function of overall graft density. Phases labeled by asterisks are experimentally achieved through modifying ligand concentration in feedstock. (b) SEM image of the mesophase obtained with Ag NCs post-synthetically modified with a feedstock mixture of 50 µM PEG20k-SH and 6 µM C16-SH. Scale bar = 500 nm, inset = 100 nm
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