Designing Patchy Colloids for Complex Pattern Assembly

In this work we investigate the stable packings and self-assembly characteristics for a set of patchy colloidal building blocks. By extending bottom-up building block assembly to include continuous off-lattice systems we use it to study a more realistic model of patchy colloids. Here, we generate the energy-minimizing packings of rigid building blocks comprised of charged and uncharged colloidal spheres confined to a liquid interface. With these stable structures in hand, we determine the interaction energies and experimental conditions that optimize their assembly from an initially disordered configuration of building blocks.