title: A design strategy for the hierarchical fabrication of colloidal hybrid mesostructures.
abstract: Advances in nanotechnology depend upon expanding the ability to create new and complex materials with well-defined multidimensional mesoscale structures. The creation of hybrid hierarchical structures by combining colloidal organic and inorganic building blocks remains a challenge due to the difficulty in preparing organic structural units of precise size and shape. Here we describe a design strategy to generate controlled hierarchical organic-inorganic hybrid architectures by multistep bottom-up self-assembly. Starting with a suspension of large inorganic nanoparticles, we anchor uniform block copolymer crystallites onto the nanoparticle surface. These colloidally stable multi-component particles can initiate the living growth of uniform cylindrical micelles from their surface, leading to three-dimensional architectures. Structures of greater complexity can be obtained by extending the micelles via addition of a second core-crystalline block copolymer. This controlled growth of polymer micelles from the surface of inorganic particles opens the door to the construction of previously inaccessible colloidal organic-inorganic hybrid structures.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H6.
authors.forename: Lin
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Jia
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H6.
authors.forename: Guangyao
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhao
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H6.
authors.forename: Weiqing
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H6.
authors.forename: Neil
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Coombs
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H6.
authors.forename: Ilya
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Gourevich
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H6.
authors.forename: Gilbert C
authors.initials: GC
authors.lastname: Walker
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H6.
authors.forename: Gerald
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Guerin
authors.affiliation: School of Chemistry, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1TS, UK.
authors.forename: Ian
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Manners
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, 80 St. George Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 1H6.
authors.forename: Mitchell A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Winnik