Relevance of packing to colloidal self-assembly
Abstract
Understanding how structural order forms in matter is a key challenge in designing materials. In the 1920s, Pauling proposed packing as a mechanism for driving structural order based on observed correlations between the structure of crystals and the mathematical packing of hard spheres. We study the ordering of several systems of hard colloids in which structural order correlates with mathematical packing and find, surprisingly, that structural order cannot arise from packing. Our approach provides statistical mechanics approaches for investigating the mathematics of packing and raises questions about the role of packing in determining the structural order of matter.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jan 30, 2018
- Source ID
- 10.1073/pnas.1720139115
Entities
People
- Greg van Anders
- Paul M. Dodd
- Rose K Cersonsky
- Sharon Glotzer
Organizations
- Army Research Office
- National Science Foundation
- Simons Foundation
- University of Michigan