Abstract
The rational design of materials requires a fundamental understanding of the mechanisms driving their self-assembly. This may be particularly challenging in highly dense and shape-asymmetric systems. Here we show how the addition of tiny non-adsorbing spheres (depletants) to a dense system of hard disc-like particles (discotics) leads to coexistence between two distinct, highly dense (liquid)-crystalline columnar phases. This coexistence emerges due to the directional-dependent free-volume pockets for depletants. Theoretical results are confirmed by simulations explicitly accounting for the binary mixture of interest. We define the stability limits of this columnar-columnar coexistence and quantify the directional-dependent depletant partitioning. This journal is
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 6720-6724 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Soft Matter |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 29 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 7 Aug 2020 |
Funding
Á. G. G. and A. C. thank Prof. A. Patti for the meeting organized at Manchester University in June 2018. Prof. Lekkerkerker and the SPC-TGM participants are thanked for discussions. AC thanks the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia Innovación y Uni-versidades and FEDER (PGC2018-097151-B-I00) for funding and C3UPO for HPC facilities.