Surface patterns such as stripes or dots have potential applications in several areas including ceramics, photonics, data storage, catalysis, biosensing and bottom-up assembly of novel materials. When the substrate has a high degree of curvature as in the case of nanoparticles and nanotubes, the self-assembled patterns affect its functionalization into a nano-building block and subsequent self-assembly into more complex structures [1,2]. For obtaining self-assembled patterns, block copolymer phase separation has traditionally been used. We present a simulational study of an alternative method to design nanopatterned surfaces by exploiting the immiscibility of a binary mixture of surfactants that form a self-assembled monolayer on the surface [1]. We show how the feature sizes and shapes of patterns obtained by this method can be tailored by varying the length difference or bulkiness of the molecules' tails, surface coverage, relative composition of the two molecules, their immiscibility and substrate curvature [3]. We examine both binary and ternary mixtures on both spherical (nanoparticles) and cylindrical surfaces (nanotubes and nanowires) [4]. A comparison with experimental findings is also provided [2, 3].

1. AM Jackson, JW Myerson, F Stellacci, Nature Materials, 3, 330-336 (2004).

2. RP Carney, GA DeVries, C Dubois, H Kim, JY Kim, C Singh, PK Ghorai, JB Tracy, RL Stiles, RW Murray, SC Glotzer and F Stellacci, Journal of American Chemical Society, (Communication), 130(3), 798-799 (2008).

3. C Singh, PK Ghorai, MA Horsch, AM Jackson, RG Larson, F Stellacci and SC Glotzer, Physical Review Letters 99, 226106 (2007).

4. C Singh and SC Glotzer, preprint.