Episode 13: Control of colloidal shapes may lead to hierarchical materials design

In this podcast episode, MRS Bulletin’s Laura Leay interviews Laura Rossi from Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands) and  Greg van Anders from the University of Michigan (USA) and Queen’s University (Canada) about advances they’ve made in colloidal preassembly in order to gain control in materials structure at a range of length scales. Through experiments and computer simulation, the researchers showed that particle interaction and particle shape can be decoupled through spherical confinement, which – when clustered – assembled differently than those observed in bulk assembly. This work was published in a recent issue of Science Advances (doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abm0548).