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Stability of Quasicrystals Composed of Soft Isotropic Particles


  Kobi Barkan [1]  ,  Haim Diamant [2]  ,  Ron Lifshitz [1]  
 [1] Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Physics and Astronomy, Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel
[2] Raymond and Beverly Sackler School of Chemistry, Tel Aviv University, 69978 Tel Aviv, Israel

Quasicrystals whose building blocks are of mesoscopic rather than atomic scale have recently been discovered in several soft-matter systems [1-4]. The stability of these structures is explained by examining a coarse-grained free energy for a system of soft isotropic particles. We show [5-6], both theoretically and numerically, that the stability can be attributed to the existence of two natural length scales in the pair potential and effective three-body interactions arising from entropy.  We thereby demonstrate how one could design the pair potential to control the self-assembly of various desired structures, including quasicrystals.

References:

[1] X. Zeng, G. Ungar, Y. Liu, V. Percec, A. E. Dulcey, and J. K. Hobbs, Nature, 428, 157 (2004).

[2] K. Hayashida, T. Dotera, A. Takano, and Y. Matsushita, Phys. Rev. Lett., 98, 195502 (2007).

[3] V. Percec, M. R. Imam, M. Peterca, D. A. Wilson, R. Graf, H. W. Spiess, V. S. K. Balagurusamy, and P. A. Heiney, J. Am. Chem. Soc., 131, 7662 (2009).

[4] D. V. Talapin, E. V. Shevchenko, M. I. Bodnarchuk, J. C. X. Ye, and C. B. Murray, Nature, 461, 964 (2009).

[5] R. Lifshitz and H. Diamant, Phil. Mag., 87, 3021 (2007).

[6] K. Barkan, H. Diamant and R. Lifshitz. Preprint (arXiv:1005.5257).