This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Creating better-performing materials comes down to having more control over their structure at the smallest possible scale. One particularly effective way to accomplish that is using nanoparticles, which have highly customizable shapes and sizes and have already shown promise in applications across energy, medicine and electronics.
But the process of turning nanoparticles into useful new materials has been hampered by the difficulty of controlling the number and direction of the links between each particle and its neighbors. Researchers have tried changing the shape of particles or precisely aligning the rigid connector chains between them, but both of those methods limit the material structures nanoparticles are able to form and are difficult to scale. A team including researchers from MIT is taking a different approach.
The researchers developed a tunable way to use superflexible connector molecules that regulate the packing of nanoparticle networks by intentionally deforming based on their surrounding environment. In a paper published in Nature Materials, the researchers showed how connector flexibility and electric charges can be used to tune the network's structure, and they used the technique to create new kinds of nanoparticle-based materials. The approach could offer a more versatile way to create high-performing materials for photonics, chemical catalysis, medicine, agriculture and more.
"People are interested in nanoparticle superlattices because of the promise of building designer materials where you have more say in what types of structures they can actually build into," says Rob Macfarlane, the Richard P. Simmons (1953) professor in metallurgy in MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering. "This is a new approach in nanoparticle assembly that hasn't been investigated before.
It's exciting to have a new tool that is so counterintuitive. It's the exact opposite of what the dogma has been for 20 years: that you need to make connector ligands rigid, and any deviation causes assembly to fail. We showed if you just crank it all the way to the opposite extreme, it works just as well." Joining Macfarlane on the paper are MIT Ph.D. candidate Nicholas Sbalbi; University of Delaware doctoral student Stephen Kronenberger; MIT undergraduate Hana Shinzawa; Matthew Ye, Ph.D. '26; and former University of Delaware professor Arthi Jayaraman.
A foundational truth in materials science is that a material's structure governs its function. "That means if you know what your building blocks are and how they're arranged, you can explain what properties materials have," Macfarlane says. "Controlling that is how you make materials that have new properties." Nanoparticles give scientists a flexible building block to make materials with desired properties, and individual nanoparticles are already used in applications as diverse as drug delivery, energy storage, computing and sensing.
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