By LIU Kun's Group

Polymer-grafted nanoparticles (NPs), in which polymer ligands covalently attached onto inorganic nanoparticle surface, have drawn considerable attention from both fundamental research and practical application fields. The polymer component can serve as either steric stabilizers in solution and in polymer matrix to prevent the agglomeration of the attached nanoparticles, or functional linkers to control the structure and collective properties of the assembly of nanoparticles. However, many fundamental limitations need to be overcome before the particle applications. The research in Prof. Kun Liu’s group is trying to synthesize new materials and develop more efficient strategies from both polymer and inorganic nanoparticle aspects to overcome the challenges.

The team have recently achieved the successful synthesis of metal Aluminium nanoparticles as a sustainable surface plasmonic nanoparticles to substitute noble metal, i.e. gold and silver. They have also developed new strategy for the synthesis of banana-shaped colloidal nanoparticles, which show unique liquid crystal phase behaviors.We demonstrated that bent rods with controlled bending angle and aspect ratio (L/D, with L and D as the length and diameter of each rod arm, respectively) can spontaneously assemble into several typical banana phases including smectic A, smectic C, synclinic tilted antiferroelectric-like smectic, and twist smectic phases, resembling bent-core LC molecules. This work opens the door to the development of novel complex types of molecular or colloidal self-organization and new functionalmaterials with electro-optical or nonlinear optical properties. (Sci. Adv. 2018, 4, eaas8829).