Kinetically guided colloidal structure formation

Abstract

The self-organization of colloidal particles is a promising approach to create novel structures and materials, with applications spanning from smart materials to optoelectronics to quantum computation. However, designing and producing mesoscale-sized structures remains a major challenge because at length scales of 10–100 μm equilibration times already become prohibitively long. Here, we extend the principle of rapid diffusion-limited cluster aggregation (DLCA) to a multicomponent system of spherical colloidal particles to enable the rational design and production of finite-sized anisotropic structures on the mesoscale. In stark contrast to equilibrium self-assembly techniques, kinetic traps are not avoided but exploited to control and guide mesoscopic structure formation. To this end the affinities, size, and stoichiometry of up to five different types of DNA-coated microspheres are adjusted to kinetically control a higher-order hierarchical aggregation process in time. We show that the aggregation process can be fully rationalized by considering an extended analytical DLCA model, allowing us to produce mesoscopic structures of up to 26 µm in diameter. This scale-free approach can easily be extended to any multicomponent system that allows for multiple orthogonal interactions, thus yielding a high potential of facilitating novel materials with tailored plasmonic excitation bands, scattering, biochemical, or mechanical behavior.