Surveying the free energy landscape of clusters of attractive colloidal spheres

SH Huang and MJ Quevillon and S Kyhl and JK Whitmer, JOURNAL OF CHEMICAL PHYSICS, 152, 134901 (2020).

DOI: 10.1063/1.5144984

Controlling the assembly of colloidal particles into specific structures has been a long-term goal of the soft materials community. Much can be learned about the process of self-assembly by examining the early stage assembly into clusters. For the simple case of hard spheres with short- range attractions, the rigid clusters of N particles (where N is small) have been enumerated theoretically and tested experimentally. Less is known, however, about how the free energy landscapes are altered when the inter-particle potential is long-ranged. In this work, we demonstrate how adaptive biasing in molecular simulations may be used to pinpoint shifts in the stability of colloidal clusters as the inter- particle potential is varied. We also discuss the generality of our techniques and strategies for application to related molecular systems.

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