海角社区 Researchers Assemble Low-Symmetry Magnetic Microstructures: Work Published in Science Advances
May 11, 2020
BATON ROUGE, LA 鈥� 海角社区 Chemical Engineering Assistant Professor Bhuvnesh Bharti and
a pair of his graduate students were recently published in Science Advances, with
their article, 鈥淢agnetic Field鈥揇riven Assembly and Reconfiguration of Multicomponent
Supraparticles,鈥� appearing in the May issue.
The article鈥攚ritten by Bharti; Ahmed Al Harraq, a second-year PhD candidate; and Jin Lee, a fourth-year PhD candidate鈥攑resents a fundamentally new concept of assembling and synthesizing micron-scale particles with unique structure, which is not achievable by any other method. This may open new routes to synthesize basic building block units involved in our everyday life.
鈥淥ne such example is electronic paper, where Janus particles analogous to the ones we use in our work are used to switch between black and white to simulate ink,鈥� Bharti said. 鈥淥ur method of assembly may provide a pathway to improve electronic paper by increasing its resolution.鈥�
鈥淲e believe that the development of highly scalable 鈥榖ottom-up鈥� approaches to material synthesis is crucial to unplug the innovation and invention of such functional devices,鈥� added Al Harraq. 鈥淥ur contribution is in the use of an external magnetic field to structure matter in the mesoscale, which is composed of particles one thousand times smaller than a grain of salt.鈥�
The physical properties of a material are governed by the assembly of its constituents. For example, both diamond and coal are chemically carbon, but the difference in assembly makes one structure a diamond and the other coal. In Bharti鈥檚 group, the trio are developing principles of guiding the assembly of particles into functional materials.
鈥淚n a sense, natural materials at the microscale, such as tissues and cells, represent the ultimate suprastructure,鈥� Al Harraq said. 鈥淭hey form without any external driving force; i.e., they self-assemble with a very high degree of complexity. Think for example of the internal structure of a cell with its organelles or of brain tissues composed of neurons and synapses.
鈥淲hen it comes to artificial assembly driven by external forces, we are still far from the level of complexity,鈥� Bharti said. 鈥淭his is mainly because we face a dichotomy when trying to connect microparticles. When we do it fast, we get relatively simple structures. The more interesting, asymmetric clusters are obtained by slow techniques that are hard to scale. Our work sits somewhere in between these two extremes and the method we proposed can be used to assemble low-symmetry supraparticles (which are a type of suprastructure) in a few seconds, using very small magnetic fields.鈥�
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