Polymorphous Packing of Pentagonal Nanoprisms

Jules Marcone (1) , Wajdi Chaâbani (1) , Claire Goldmann (1) , Marianne Impéror-Clerc (1) , Doru Constantin (2) , Cyrille Hamon (1)

1 LPS - Laboratoire de Physique des Solides
2 ICS - Institut Charles Sadron

Packing solid shapes into regular lattices can yield very complex assemblies, not all of which achieve the highest packing fraction. In two dimensions, the regular pentagon is paradigmatic, being the simplest shape that does not pave the plane completely. In this work, we demonstrate the packing of plasmonic nanoprisms with pentagonal cross section, which form extended supercrystals. We do encounter the long-predicted ice-ray and Dürer packings (with packing fractions of 0.921 and 0.854, respectively), but also a variety of novel polymorphs that can be obtained from these two configurations by a continuous sliding transformation and exhibit an intermediate packing fraction. Beyond the fundamental interest of this result, fine control over the density and symmetry of such plasmonic assemblies opens the perspective of tuning their optical properties, with potential applications in metamaterial fabrication, catalysis or molecular detection.

Mots clés: nanoparticles; pentagonal packing; silver nanorods; superlattices; self-assembly

Domaines: Matière Molle [cond-mat.soft]

Jules Marcone, Wajdi Chaâbani, Claire Goldmann, Marianne Impéror-Clerc, Doru Constantin, et al.. Polymorphous Packing of Pentagonal Nanoprisms. Nano Letters, 2023, ⟨10.1021/acs.nanolett.2c04541⟩. ⟨hal-03992796⟩