Final Report Summary - PATCHYCOLLOIDS (Patchy colloidal particles: a powerful arsenal for the fabrication of tomorrow new super-molecules . A theoretical and numerical study of their assembly processes.)
The PATCHYCOLLOIDS project has been extremely successful. The last five years
have been indeed an exciting and productive time. My collaborators and I have
worked extremly hard to reach the project goals and even go beyond what was
originally proposed. During the five years, we have published
1 Nature Materials
1 Nature Physics
2 Nature Communications
1 PNAS
10 PRL
in addition to four news&views in Nature and Nature Materials and 65 additional articles published in internationally refereed journals.
The project has offered me the possibility to establish a collaborative and cohesive international group of young scientists, which have worked in the different tasks, each of them contributing to the success of the project. The hired system manager has bought, assembled and managed the computational facilities which have provided the numerical power requested to perform the impressive state of the art (and beyond) numerical investigations. The results of the project have been present to several international conferences, in seminars and colloquia, in an effective dissemination of the results. The large number of citations, already received by articles acknowledging the PATCHYCOLLOIDS project (over 700 excluding self citations) is a clear evidence of this effectiveness.
I can say that we have fulfilled the project propositions and reached a deep level of understanding in the behavior of patchy colloidal particles, the bricks of tomorrow materials. We now know the collective behavior of these particles, their crystal phases, their self-assembly abilities. We have modeled the competition between self-assembly and phase separation and the competition between gel formation and crystallization. We have discovered that patchy particles can form liquids which are more stable than crystals. We have investigated how self-assembly can be exploited to control the interaction between other colloidal particles and the differences between physical and chemical colloidal gels. We have complemented numerical investigation with experimental test of the most intriguing predictions, designing and producing bulk quantities of DNA nano-particles with controlled valence.
have been indeed an exciting and productive time. My collaborators and I have
worked extremly hard to reach the project goals and even go beyond what was
originally proposed. During the five years, we have published
1 Nature Materials
1 Nature Physics
2 Nature Communications
1 PNAS
10 PRL
in addition to four news&views in Nature and Nature Materials and 65 additional articles published in internationally refereed journals.
The project has offered me the possibility to establish a collaborative and cohesive international group of young scientists, which have worked in the different tasks, each of them contributing to the success of the project. The hired system manager has bought, assembled and managed the computational facilities which have provided the numerical power requested to perform the impressive state of the art (and beyond) numerical investigations. The results of the project have been present to several international conferences, in seminars and colloquia, in an effective dissemination of the results. The large number of citations, already received by articles acknowledging the PATCHYCOLLOIDS project (over 700 excluding self citations) is a clear evidence of this effectiveness.
I can say that we have fulfilled the project propositions and reached a deep level of understanding in the behavior of patchy colloidal particles, the bricks of tomorrow materials. We now know the collective behavior of these particles, their crystal phases, their self-assembly abilities. We have modeled the competition between self-assembly and phase separation and the competition between gel formation and crystallization. We have discovered that patchy particles can form liquids which are more stable than crystals. We have investigated how self-assembly can be exploited to control the interaction between other colloidal particles and the differences between physical and chemical colloidal gels. We have complemented numerical investigation with experimental test of the most intriguing predictions, designing and producing bulk quantities of DNA nano-particles with controlled valence.