Cluster image
Image by Dr Paddy Royall and colleagues

Dr Paddy Royall, Alex Malins (PhD student in the School of Chemistry) and collaborators recently published a paper in Nature Scientific Reports.

Called 'Novel kinetic trapping in charged colloidal clusters due to self-induced surface charge organization', the paper describes how particle-resolved studies reveal unexpected kinetic pathways in self-assembly of colloidal clusters, leading to long-lived metastable structures. This demonstrates that direct real-space imaging has implications for unravelling challenges in self-assembly, in particular when the kinetics dominate thermodynamics leading to undesired by-products.