Colloidal self-assembly is a promising avenue towards the fabrication of materials possessing novel microstructures. While the connection between colloidal interactions and the resultant self-assembled structures is often not obvious, various inverse schemes have been developed in order to discover interaction potentials that prompt self-assembly of a desired microstructure. It is well established that interactions possessing both short-ranged attractions and long-ranged repulsions allow for self-assembly of intriguing equilibrium structures, such as equilibrium cluster fluids, porous assemblies and gels. In this talk, we discuss several potentials that have been optimized so that the competition between the interparticle attractions and repulsions yields a variety of non-trivial structures, including gels, cluster fluids, and other modulated phases. To facilitate realization of such structures, the interaction potentials have a physically relevant form, where the attractive component of the potential is derived from a depletion interaction and the repulsion corresponds to electrostatic interactions.

Self-assembly of gels, clusters, and other modulated phases via a physically informed model

ACS Spring 2022

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