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Materials science

Soft particles feel the squeeze

Nature volume 460, pages 465–466 (2009)Cite this article

It's hard to fit in when you're different — especially if you're a large particle trying to squeeze into an array of smaller ones. But some soft, polymeric particles simply shrink to fit the space available.

A crystal can grow only if all of its atomic or molecular building blocks fit into the periodic lattice. This is true even for colloidal crystals, which form through the ordered self-assembly of micrometre-sized particles. The requirement for periodicity puts stringent constraints on the variation in the size of particles that can be incorporated into a given colloidal crystalline lattice. But reporting in Angewandte Chemie, Iyer and Lyon1 show that crystals made of microgel particles are much more tolerant of particle size variations than was expected. This surprising feature might have practical implications for the design of ordered colloidal materials.

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Figure 1: Squeezing in.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Daan Frenkel is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK. df246@cam.ac.uk,

    Daan Frenkel

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  1. Daan Frenkel
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Frenkel, D. Soft particles feel the squeeze. Nature 460, 465–466 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/460465a

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