(475f) Self-Assembly of Colloidal Metamaterials By Controlling Nucleation and Growth

Assembling optical metamaterials from colloidal building blocks has been a central goal of programmable self-assembly for decades. Despite significant advances in expanding the structural diversity of colloidal crystals and gels, a lack of understanding of the dynamic pathways to assembly has hindered the realization of programmable metamaterials. In this talk, I will describe how we combine microfluidics-based experiments and theory to develop a complete understanding of the crystallization dynamics of DNA-coated colloids. Specifically, I will show that the nucleation and growth kinetics of DNA-coated colloids are fundamentally different from those of atoms or small molecules, owing to an effective friction that arises from transient DNA hybridization. By incorporating this effective friction into classical theories, such as classical nucleation theory, we can predict the absolute rates of nucleation and crystal growth with quantitative accuracy. I will conclude by showing how we use this quantitative picture of the crystallization dynamics to design new non-equilibrium protocols for making macroscopic photonic materials that contain tens of millions of particles and can even be seen by the naked eye. Taken together, these experiments constitute one of the most well-controlled studies of nucleation and growth to date, and represent a key step forward in the creation of next-generation optical metamaterials from colloids.