Simulation of feedback driven self-assembly in mass assembly-line. The tilted network indicates aqueous flow in space (blue reservoir). The plasmon gauged potential (red) phothermally dissociates unwanted assemblies and re-assembles into the desired dimers.
If you can uniformly break the symmetry of nanorod pairs in a colloidal solution, you're a step ahead of the game toward achieving new and exciting metamaterial properties. But traditional thermodynamic -driven colloidal assembly of these metamaterials, which are materials defined by their non-naturally-occurring properties, often result in structures with high degree of symmetries in the bulk material. In this case, the energy requirement does not allow the structure to break its symmetry. In a study led by Xiang Zhang, director of Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, he and his research group at the University of California (UC) Berkeley achieved symmetry-breaking in a bulk metamaterial solution for the first time. Zhang and his group demonstrated self-assembled optical metamaterials with tailored broken-symmetries and hence unique electromagnetic responses that can be achieved via their new method. The results have been published. The paper is titled "Feedback-driven self-assembly of symmetry-breaking optical metamaterials in solution." "We developed an innovative self-assembly route which could surpass the conventional thermodynamic limit in chemical synthetic systems" explains Sui Yang, lead author of the Nature Nanotechnology paper and member of Zhang's research group.
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