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Colloidal self-assembly

Interlocked octapods

Suspensions of octapod-shaped nanocrystals are seen to spontaneously interlock into chains, which in turn aggregate side-by-side to form three-dimensional crystals. The observed hierarchical self-assembly can be explained by the octapod's shape and the solvent-tunable van der Waals interactions.

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Figure 1: Hierarchical self-assembly of nanometre-sized octapods5.
Figure 2: Predicting the self-assembly and densest configurations of simple objects is hard.

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Correspondence to Dmitri V. Talapin.

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Rupich, S., Talapin, D. Interlocked octapods. Nature Mater 10, 815–816 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3158

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