Alternating Copolymerization of Inorganic Nanoparticles

Nanoparticle self-assembly has emerged as an indispensable tool in designing structured materials with a wide range of applications, but quantitatively predicting the assembly process and structures still remains challenging. Drawing inspiration from the toolbox of molecular reactions and behaviors is of utmost importance in further advancement of principles and theories for assembling nanoparticles at a length scale orders of magnitude larger. Here we represent a general paradigm for the predictive self-assembly of binary inorganic nanoparticles into linear nanostructures in periodic sequence by expanding the horizon of alternating copolymerization at the molecular level to nanoscale colloidal systems. Nanoparticles grafted with reactive block copolymers are viewed as nanoscale monomers ("nanomers"), and the rapid dimerization of co-nanomers into molecular dipole-like dimers, resembling the preferential formation of dimeric intermediates or charge-transfer complexes from co-monomers in molecular copolymerization, is crucial to the organization of co-nanomers in alternating sequence. We also demonstrate that the classic kinetics and statistics of polycondensation of molecular alternating copolymers (e.g., Nylon-66) can be utilized to quantitatively predict the copolymerization process of nanomers.