Can I read Hierarchical Assembly May Be a Way to Make Large Information-rich Structures on EtoBox?

Hierarchical Assembly May Be a Way to Make Large Information-rich Structures by Whitelam, Stephen is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Hierarchical Assembly May Be a Way to Make Large Information-rich Structures about?

Self-assembly in the laboratory can now yield `information-rich' nanostructures in which each component is of a distinct type and has a defined spatial position. Ensuring the thermodynamic stability of such structures requires inter-component interaction energies to increase logarithmically with structure size, in order to counter the entropy gained upon mixing component types in solution. However, self-assembly in the presence of strong interactions results in general in kinetic trapping, so suggesting a limit to the size of an (equilibrium) structure that can be self-assembled from distinguishable components. Here we study numerically a two-dimensional hierarchical assembly scheme already considered in experiment. We show that this scheme is immune to the kinetic traps associated with strong `native' interactions (interactions designed to stabilize the intended structure), and so, in principle, offers a way to make large information-rich structures. In this scheme the size of an assembled structure scales exponentially with the stage of assembly, and assembly can continue as long as random motion is able to bring structures into contact. The resulting superstructure could provide

Author

Whitelam, Stephen

Published

2015

Language

EN