Inverse Design of Soft Materials: Crystals, Quasi Crystals, Liquid Crystals

In 1960, Feynman challenged us to think “from the bottom up” and to create new functional materials by directing and manipulating the arrangements of individual atoms ourselves. With recent advances in the synthesis of colloidal nanoparticles and the bottom-up fabrication of nanostructured materials using colloidal self-assembly, we are tantalizingly close to realizing this dream. In this talk, I will show using theory and simulations how one can structure matter over multiple length scales using hierarchical self-assembly. The prediction and design of these structures remains an important challenge for nanomaterials science. I will present a method to predict which structures are stable assuming the shape and interactions between the constituent particles are known, and I will show that particle shape alone can already give rise to a wide variety of structures such as (plastic) crystals [1,2], quasi crystals [3] , and liquid crystals [4,5], which can be classified using machine learning techniques. Subsequently, I will show how one can reverse-engineer the particle shape to stabilize highly exotic liquid crystal phases.


[1] M. Dijkstra, Advances in Chemical Physics 156, 35-71 (2015)
[2] B. de Nijs, S. Dussi, F. Smallenburg, J.D. Meeldijk, D.J. Groenendijk, L. Filion, A. Imhof, A. van Blaaderen, and M. Dijkstra, Nature Materials 14, 56-60 (2015).
[3] D. Wang, T. Dasgupta, E.B. van der Wee, D. Zanaga, T. Altantzis, Y. Wu, G.M. Coli, C.B. Murray, S. Bals, M. Dijkstra, and A. van Blaaderen, arXiv:1906.10088v1 (2019).
[4] M. Chiappini, T. Drwenski, R. van Roij, and M. Dijkstra, Physical Review Letters 123 (6), 068001 (2019).
[5] S. Dussi, M. Dijkstra, Nature Communications 7, 11175 (2016).