Diamond family of nanoparticle superlattices

Citation

Liu, W.; Tagawa, M.; Xin, H.L.; Wang, T.; Emamy, H. Li, H.; Yager, K.G.; Starr, F.W.; Tkachenko, A.V.; Gang, O. "Diamond family of nanoparticle superlattices" Science 2016, 351 582–586.
doi: 10.1126/science.aad2080

Summary

DNA-coated nanoparticles are assembled into superlattices. For the first time, the nanoscale analogue of the diamond lattice is demonstrated.

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.