Magnetic Handshake Materials: an Integrative Programmable Assembly Platform

Magnetic Handshake Materials is a recently developed materials platform that can encode specific interactions by printing distinct magnetic dipole patterns onto a substrate. Using this platform, we have achieved controlled polymerization, complementary binding strands, and 3D folding from 2D nets by self-assembly [1]. These results all built on the core principle of creating specific bindings, but they showcased only a tiny fraction of the programmability of the platform. In this talk, I will discuss how we can achieve complicated self-assembly behaviors in experiment by designing building block interactions from scratch. First, I will present a simple design criterion that enables high specificity (low-crosstalk) in building block interactions and a theoretical framework utilizing information theory that can measure the performance of a collection of designed building blocks. Second, I will show simulation results for our targeted self-assembly tasks using the designed building blocks compared to the randomly generated ones. Third, I will describe how we can realize the same self-assembly behaviors in experiment using our designed building blocks.

[1] R. Niu, C. X. Du, E. Esposito, J. Ng, M. P. Brenner, P. McEuen, and I. Cohen, PNAS (2019)