Self-assembly of nanoparticles into 1-D, 2-D and 3-D nanostructures is promising for exploiting their collective properties. A significant challenge to realize their potential to meet technologically relevant needs is to fabricate 3-D assembly of nanoparticles with rational designed structures and functionalities compatible with existing manufacturing infrastructure. Top-down approaches such as lithography are insufficient to achieve feature size less than 10 nm and to generate hierarchical 3-D assemblies. Block copolymer (BCP) directed self-assembly, provides an alternative avenue to address these limitations, but are restrictive to nanoparticle size (d) to be below a fraction of BCP periodicity (D). The restriction in particle size prohibits the application of the method to nanoparticles with exciting size-dependent and structure-dependent properties. We demonstrate here that nanocomposites consisting of block copolymer-based supramolecules and nanoparticles offer a versatile platform to direct the assembly of relatively large nanoparticles with single particle precision. Excess small molecules are critical in preventing macrophase separation and achieving a <i>d</i>/<i>D</i> ratio as high as 1.6. It is also found that morphologies with square and hexagonal symmetries can be generated within the system. This supramolecular approach opens up a new route to overcome the limitations in nanoparticle size to obtain synergistic assembly, and the multicomponent nature gives rise to morphologies inaccessible previously.

Large nanoparticle assembly in block copolymer-based supramolecule

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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