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Patchy colloids: Entropy stabilizes open crystals

Nature Materials, ISSN: 1476-4660, Vol: 12, Issue: 3, Page: 179-180
2013
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Article Description

Open crystalline configurations self-assembled from colloids with sticky patches have recently been shown to be unexpectedly stable. A theory that accounts for the entropy of the colloids' thermal fluctuations now explains why. Entropy can be a subtle and elusive concept. Although in some sense it is the quantification of disorder, it has long been known that for hard spheres at high density an ordered crystal has higher entropy than a disordered fluid. The existence of a bond between two particles in contact requires that the two involved patches cover the contact point, whose position is known. Each particle can therefore fluctuate independently within an angular domain set purely by the constraint that its patches cover all contact points with its bondable neighbors. Building on this simplification, Mao and co-authors construct an effective description of the interactions in a system of patchy particles with fluctuating lattice positions, and compare it with experimental data on the mode structure of lattice vibrations for triblock Janus spheres.

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