ABSTRACT
1322Due to their potential for creating “designer materials,” the 3D assembly of nanoparticle building blocks into macroscopic structures with well-defined order and symmetry remains one of the most important challenges in materials science [1–5]. Furthermore, superlattices consisting of noble-metal nanoparticles have emerged as a new platform for the bottom-up design of plasmonic metamaterials [6–8]. The allure of optical metamaterials is that they provide a means for altering the temporal and spatial propagation of electromagnetic fields, resulting in materials that exhibit many properties that do not exist in nature [9–13]. With the vast array of nanostructures now synthetically realizable, computational methods play a crucial role in identifying the assemblies that exhibit the most exciting properties [14]. Once target assemblies are identified, the synthesis of nanometer-scale structures for use at optical and IR wavelengths must be taken into account. Many of the current methods to fabricate metamaterials in the optical range use serial lithographic-based approaches [6]. The challenge of controlled assembly into well-defined architectures has kept bottom-up methods that rely on the self-organization of colloidal metal nanoparticles from being fully explored for metamaterial applications [8]. DNA-mediated assembly of nanoparticles has the potential to help overcome this challenge. The predictability and programmability of DNA makes it a powerful tool for the rational assembly of plasmonic nanoparticles with tunable nearest-neighbor distances and symmetries [1, 15–18].
