Designing Dissipative Self-Assembly

With recent developments in experimental techniques, we can begin to consider the synthesis and fabrication of switchable building blocks that can dynamically switch between two or more states introducing new non-equilibrium, dissipative dynamics into the self-assembly process. Particles that can toggle their shape or interactions based on some external stimulus are examples of switchable particles. In this work, we present some of the new possibilities that arise from introducing switchability and non-equilibrium dynamics into the self-assembly process.  These possibilities include the stabilization of novel steady-state structures, the enhancement of self-assembly speed and propensity, the ability to capture, or dynamically arrest, a pattern that was previously only available as a transient structure as the system evolved towards equilibrium, and the ability to dynamically tune the phase and length scale of the self-assembled systems by adjusting an external non-thermodynamic control signal. 

This material is based in part upon work supported as part of the Non-Equilibrium Energy Research Center (NERC), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-SC0000989.