Nanoparticle assemblies had drawn tremendous interest because of their potential applications in the fields of biomedicine, drug delivery, therapeutics, and cancer cell imaging. Building nanoparticle assemblies that are responsive to external stimuli offers great potential to tune a wide array of morphological transitions. Self-assembly of polymer grafted nanoparticles is responsive to external stimuli including polymer chain length, polymer concentration, salt concentration, pH, ionic strength of salt, and so on. In the present work, we used electrostatics to tune these stimuli-responsive transitions in solutions. Molecular dynamics simulations have been performed in the framework of the coarse grain model using LAMMPS to study and understand the transitions in self-assembly. By varying parameters including polymer and salt concentration, matrix length, and weight, we are able to tune the transitions of self-assembled morphologies from rings to dispersed state, ordered crystal structures to smaller disordered aggregates. This offers wide applications in bio-imaging, targeting drug delivery, and sensing applications.

Stimuli-responsive behaviour of nanoparticle assemblies In polymer matrix and solutions

ACS Spring 2022

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