A design strategy for the hierarchical fabrication of colloidal hybrid mesostructures

• Published in: Nature communications 2014-05, Vol.5 (1), p.3882-3882, Article 3882
• Main Authors: Jia, Lin, Zhao, Guangyao, Shi, Weiqing, Coombs, Neil, Gourevich, Ilya, Walker, Gilbert C., Guerin, Gerald, Manners, Ian, Winnik, Mitchell A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 639/301/357/404; 639/301/923/916; 639/925/930/1032; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Science; Science (multidisciplinary)
• ISSN: 2041-1723; 2041-1723
• DOI: 10.1038/ncomms4882

Advances in nanotechnology depend upon expanding the ability to create new and complex materials with well-defined multidimensional mesoscale structures. The creation of hybrid hierarchical structures by combining colloidal organic and inorganic building blocks remains a challenge due to the difficulty in preparing organic structural units of precise size and shape. Here we describe a design strategy to generate controlled hierarchical organic–inorganic hybrid architectures by multistep bottom-up self-assembly. Starting with a suspension of large inorganic nanoparticles, we anchor uniform block copolymer crystallites onto the nanoparticle surface. These colloidally stable multi-component particles can initiate the living growth of uniform cylindrical micelles from their surface, leading to three-dimensional architectures. Structures of greater complexity can be obtained by extending the micelles via addition of a second core-crystalline block copolymer. This controlled growth of polymer micelles from the surface of inorganic particles opens the door to the construction of previously inaccessible colloidal organic–inorganic hybrid structures. Achieving a high degree of control over the self-assembly process is a challenging task, but one that can give access to precisely defined structures. Here, the authors show the generation of hybrid materials with controlled morphology and hierarchy based on the assembly of block copolymers on silica cores.