Many MindedFloppy polymer linkers let nanoparticles form crystals not seen before
A research team led by MIT has reported in Nature Materials (2026) a way to assemble nanoparticles into ordered crystal structures that had not been seen before. The first author listed in the citation is Sbalbi.
For roughly 20 years, the linkers (ligands) that join nanoparticles into superlattices were mostly designed to be rigid and fixed. This team used flexible, floppy ligands instead. They built two types of gold nanoparticles with opposite charges, each carrying ligands made of the polymer PEG. The ligand tips carried positive or negative charges so the particles would connect. Computer simulations ran alongside the experiments to match what was observed.
The flexibility changes the geometry. The floppy ligands bunch together where particles touch, which caps how many connections each particle can make. Smaller particles form fewer links, and ligand chain length also matters. Rob Macfarlane, an MIT materials scientist, says polymer flexibility sets how many bonds each particle has.
This matters for goods because the range of buildable structures is a limit on what materials can do. A new design rule that opens more arrangements widens the palette for anyone designing materials from the bottom up. The researchers point to possible uses in photonics, chemical catalysis, medicine and agriculture. Better catalysts and optical materials could eventually bring down the cost of energy and manufacturing, but that is our inference rather than a result.
The caveats are large. Nobody has yet examined or tested what the new structures do. The applications are potential, not demonstrated, and the source does not mention batteries or electronics specifically. Only gold nanoparticles with PEG ligands have been tried. Next steps are testing other particle materials and ligand combinations, then trying the materials in real-world scenarios.
Source: ScienceAlert