Designing a Bernal spiral from patchy colloids.
A model potential for colloidal building blocks is defined with two different types of attractive surface sites, described as complementary patches and antipatches. A Bernal spiral is identified as the global minimum for clusters with appropriate arrangements of three patch-antipatch pairs. We further derive a minimalist design rule with only one patch and antipatch, which also produces a Bernal spiral. Monte Carlo simulations of these patchy colloidal building blocks in the bulk are generally found to corroborate the global optimization results.
University Chemical Laboratories, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, United Kingdom.
John W R
JW
Morgan
Dwaipayan
D
Chakrabarti
Nicolas
N
Dorsaz
David J
DJ
Wales