The stabilization of tubular crystals in mixtures of spherical particles

• Published in: Soft matter Vol. 13; no. 7; pp. 1344 - 1351
• Main Authors: Douglass, Ian, Mayger, Helen, Hudson, Toby, Harrowell, Peter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England 15.02.2017
• ISSN: 1744-683X; 1744-6848
• DOI: 10.1039/c6sm02636b

Novel crystal structures in binary atomic mixtures arise when the attractive well is wide enough to allow double occupancy by small particles. The resulting crystals consist of ordered packings of self assembled linear structures comprised of a cylindrical tube of large particles enclosing a close packed core of small particles that corresponds to a stacking of overlapping icosahedra. We show that the stability of these structures depends on two essential features of the spherically symmetric pairwise interactions: (i) a radius ratio between 0.414 and 0.588, and (ii) a width w of the attractive well in the interaction between unlike particles that satisfies w > σ SS where σ SS is the diameter of the small particle. Binary mixtures of spherical particles can self assemble into crystals of cylindrical tubes of stacked icosahedra when the attractive well is wide enough to allow double occupancy by the smaller particles.