Perfectly Formed

Just as a detailed picture is made of many pixels, increasingly detailed 3D designs become possible with tiny building blocks. Nanoparticles have the potential to bend light, conduct electricity, or be shaped into tiny machines – but how to steer them into a design? Here nanotechnologists use mathematical models to predict how thousands of nanoplatelets – disc shaped nanoparticles 10 million times smaller than Smarties – behave when grouped into spherical supraparticles. Each row shows two similar particles from the outside (first and third images) or sliced open (second and fourth). Colours link similarly-aligned particles – as we look down the rows, and the nanoplatelets become more rounded, the particles point in a greater variety of colourful directions. Something else emerges – the most rounded particles (bottom) flick outwards, lining the surface of their supraparticle. In real life, this quirk may help in designing drug carrying particles for use in research and medicine.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image from work by Da Wang and Michiel Hermes, and colleagues
• Soft Condensed Matter, Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, October 2022