Barbara Capone

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Perdita Phillips

Independent Researcher

R. Michael Feener

Kyoto University

David Seamon

Kansas State University

Rajendra Shrestha

Asian Institute of Technology (AIT)

Louis Addae-Wireko

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

Jason von Meding

University of Florida

Wolfgang Behr

University of Zurich, Switzerland

Haris Tsavdaroglou

University of Amsterdam

Jonathan Quaye-Ballard

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

Alessandro Coppola

Politecnico di Milano

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Papers by Barbara Capone

Design of Polymeric Self-Assembling Materials and Nanocomposites in the Semi-dilute Density Regime: Multiscale Modeling

Design of Self-Assembling Materials, 2017

Creating novel building blocks, which allow for an easy and large scale fabrication of complex ma... more Creating novel building blocks, which allow for an easy and large scale fabrication of complex materials, is a challenge and a central goal of diverse scientific fields, ranging from Physics to Materials Science. Over the past years, much effort has been devoted into creating tunable building blocks that could self assemble and stabilize complex structures with particular features such as, for example, the diamond lattice, renowned for its important photonic properties (Maldovan and Thomas, Nat Mater 3:593, 2004). This has motivated materials scientists to undertake a large scale analysis of building blocks of various shapes (Damasceno et al., Science 337(6093):453–457, 2012) and diversified functionalizations (Glotzer and Solomon, Nat Mater 6(8):557–562, 2007; Torquato and Jiao, Nature 460(7257):876–879, 2009; Akcora et al., Nat Mater 8(4):354–359, 2009). Colloids functionalized with attractive or repulsive regions (patches) (Bianchi et al., Phys Chem Chem Phys 13(14):6397–6410, 2011; Ferrari et al., J Phys Condens Matter 27(23):234104, 2015; Bianchi et al., J Phys Condens Matter 27:230301, 2015; van Oostrum et al., J Phys Condens Matter 27(23):234105, 2015; Grunewald et al., Chem Mater. 27(13):4763–4771, 2015; Choueiri et al., Nature 538(7623):79–83, 2016) showed interesting self-assembly behavior, which can be tuned either by changing the shape of the patches or their relative orientation (Romano et al., J Chem Phys 132(18):184501, 2010). State of the art methods for the synthesis of such particles include lithography (Snyder et al., Langmuir 21(11):4813–4815, 2005; Yake et al., Langmuir 23(17): 9069–9075, 2007), microfluidics (Nie et al., J Am Chem Soc 128(29):9408–9412, 2006) or glancing angle deposition (Pawar and Kretzschmar, Langmuir 24(2):355–358, 2008; Pawar and Kretzschmar, Langmuir 25(16):9057–9063, 2009). However, shape-specific particle fabrication becomes more challenging when the particle has to be decorated with a large number of patches or if the shape and location of the patches has to be tuned and controlled with extremely high precision. Therefore, even though novel and interesting structures appear to be theoretically possible, they still remain hard to realize experimentally, given the precision required to achieve precise shape and relative orientation of the patches. Another extremely interesting class of functionalized particles is represented by DNA coated colloids, where colloids are covered with a brush of double stranded DNA terminating into a short segment of single stranded DNA. The terminal part of the brush is functionalized to attach only to complementary DNA strands. Such a high selectivity in the hybridization should, on the one hand, allow for an extremely precise tuning of the final structure that the colloid is designed to self assemble into but, on the other hand, it also induces a dynamical trapping into metastable structures. It has been shown that, in order to control and reduce the disordered region in the phase diagram of DNA coated colloids, it is necessary to re-introduce some entropy (Mognetti et al., Soft Matter 8(7):2213–2221, 2012; Angioletti-Uberti et al., Nat Mater 11(6):518–522, 2012).

Grafting density induced reentrant disorder-order-disorder transition in planar di-block copolymer brushes

Soft matter, 2021

By means of multiscale molecular simulation, we show that solvophilic-solvophobic AB diblock copo... more By means of multiscale molecular simulation, we show that solvophilic-solvophobic AB diblock copolymer brushes in the semi-dilute regime present a re-entrant disorder/order/disorder transition. The latter is fully controllable through two parameters: the grafting density and the solvophobic to solvophilic ratio of the tethered macromolecules. Upon increasing density, chains first aggregate into patches, then further order into a crystalline phase and finally melt into a disordered phase. We demonstrate that the order/disorder transition can be explained through the peculiar properties of the aggregates: upon increasing density, the aggregation number grows as expected. On the contrary, their projection on the plane shrinks, thus melting the emergent ordered phase. Such a density dependent shrinkage, seen for the first time as the cause to an order/disorder phase transition, is as a consequence of the entropic/enthalpic competition that characterises the hierarchical self-assembly of...

Barbara Capone

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