Etienne Ducrot
CNRS, CRPP (Centre de Recherche Paul Pascal, Université de Bordeaux
https://etienneducrot.weebly.com/

“Self-assembly pathways to colloidal diamond lattices “

The concept of self-assembly in material science is exciting as it carries the idea of seeing macroscopic materials, structured at the micron or nano scale, assemble spontaneously from a soup of prebuild and programed building blocks. Over the past decade, the field of colloidal self-assembly has seen the emergence of strategies to get spherical particles to form spontaneously crystals equivalent to simple ionic crystals. The recent increase in complexity of the building blocks and their programmed interactions allowed to greatly extend the range of crystalline phases accessible by self-assembly, securing a viable pathway to very valuable materials. After a general introduction on DNA programmed interactions and colloidal self-assembly, I will present two alternative strategies we recently developed to guide particles to form one of the self-assembly grail: the diamond lattice. This tetra-coordinated open structure is of great interest for its full photonic band gap properties. I will discuss its formation using a co-assembled sub-lattice to form a Laves phase, and its direct assembly from designed interlocking colloidal cluster.