Shape Influences Flexibility and Valence in Flexible Colloidal Molecules.

Colloidal molecules are ideal building blocks for bottom-up self-assembly of flexible smart materials. The recent realization of microscopic flexible joints in experimental studies has enabled the study of the behaviour of colloidal flexible structures. However, the full range of motion that is provided by a spherical colloidal flexible joint may be incapable to achieve constraint flexibility. In this work, using colloidal joints and geometric principles, we design flexible colloidal molecules with controlled flexibility and valences. We achieve this by mixing complementarily functionalized spheres and cubes in a high number ratio to obtained specific valence molecules. Depending on the size of the sphere and cube we obtained molecules with different valence. These flexible colloidal molecules can be used as building blocks for assembling flexible higher-order structures.