Design racional de arquiteturas helicoidais

Rational design of helical architectures

Dwaipayan Chakrabarti, Szilard N. Fejer and David J. Wales 1

- Author Affiliations

University Chemical Laboratories, Lensfield Road, Cambridge CB2 1EW, United Kingdom

Edited by Angel E. Garcia, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, and accepted by the Editorial Board September 22, 2009 (received for review June 16, 2009)

Abstract

Nature has mastered the art of creating complex structures through self-assembly of simpler building blocks. Adapting such a bottom-up view provides a potential route to the fabrication of novel materials. However, this approach suffers from the lack of a sufficiently detailed understanding of the noncovalent forces that hold the self-assembled structures together. Here we demonstrate that nature can indeed guide us, as we explore routes to helicity with achiral building blocks driven by the interplay between two competing length scales for the interactions, as in DNA. By characterizing global minima for clusters, we illustrate several realizations of helical architecture, the simplest one involving ellipsoids of revolution as building blocks. In particular, we show that axially symmetric soft discoids can self-assemble into helical columnar arrangements. Understanding the molecular origin of such spatial organisation has important implications for the rational design of materials with useful optoelectronic applications.

anisotropic interactions columnar arrangements helix self-assembly

Footnotes

1To whom correspondence should be addressed: E-mail: dw34@cam.ac.uk

Author contributions: D.C. and D.J.W. designed research; D.C. and S.N.F. performed research; D.C. and S.N.F. analyzed data; and D.C. and D.J.W. wrote the paper.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. A.E.G. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.

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