Robert J. Macfarlane

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MIT team shows flexible ligands can direct nanoparticle assembly

Senior author on the Nature Materials paper

For about 20 years, the rule for building ordered materials from nanoparticles was to make the connector molecules rigid. Flexible links were expected to produce disorder. A team at MIT has now assembled nanoparticles by doing the opposite.

Updated 1 hour ago

Notable Quotes

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.

from MIT team shows flexible ligands can direct nanoparticle assembly · Updated 1 hour ago

The amount of flexibility of the polymer dictates how many bonds it has. It allows us to lower the number of bonds each particle has and make lattices we have never seen before.

from MIT team shows flexible ligands can direct nanoparticle assembly · Updated 1 hour ago