Greg van Anders, N. Khalid Ahmed, Ross Smith, Michael Engel, Sharon C. Glotzer
Directional entropic forces that cause particle alignment have recently been proposed in systems of hard polyhedra that order into crystals. Here we provide a means of quantifying these forces and find them to be of the order of a few kT. We show that these forces originate from "entropic patches," which are features of particle shape that promote local dense packing. Using the notion of entropic patches, we engineer particle shape to target the assembly of specific crystal structures. We show that this procedure can be generalized as anisotropy dimensions, similar to those exploited for enthalpically patchy particles.
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http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.7545
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