title: Directing colloidal assembly and a metal-insulator transition using a quench-disordered porous rod template.
abstract: Replica and effective-medium theory methods are employed to elucidate how to massively reconfigure a colloidal assembly to achieve globally homogeneous, strongly clustered, and percolated equilibrium states of high electrical conductivity at low physical volume fractions. A key idea is to employ a quench-disordered, large-mesh rigid-rod network as a templating internal field. By exploiting bulk phase separation frustration and the tunable competing processes of colloid adsorption on the low-dimensional network and fluctuation-driven colloid clustering in the pore spaces, two distinct spatial organizations of greatly enhanced particle contacts can be achieved. As a result, a continuous, but very abrupt, transition from an insulating to metallic-like state can be realized via a small change of either the colloid-template or colloid-colloid attraction strength. The approach is generalizable to more complicated template or colloidal architectures.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA and Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
authors.forename: Ryan B
authors.initials: RB
authors.lastname: Jadrich
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA and Department of Materials Science, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA and Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
authors.forename: Kenneth S
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Schweizer