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Published in

American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science, 6273(351), p. 582-586, 2016

DOI: 10.1126/science.aad2080

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Diamond family of nanoparticle superlattices

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Preprint: archiving allowed
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Postprint: archiving allowed
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Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

Diamond lattices formed by atomic or colloidal elements exhibit remarkable functional properties. However, building such structures via self-assembly has proven to be challenging because of the low packing fraction, sensitivity to bond orientation, and local heterogeneity. We report a strategy for creating a diamond superlattice of nano-objects via self-assembly and demonstrate its experimental realization by assembling two variant diamond lattices, one with and one without atomic analogs. Our approach relies on the association between anisotropic particles with well-defined tetravalent binding topology and isotropic particles. The constrained packing of triangular binding footprints of truncated tetrahedra on a sphere defines a unique three-dimensional lattice. Hence, the diamond self-assembly problem is solved via its mapping onto two-dimensional triangular packing on the surface of isotropic spherical particles.