Fabrication and Applications of Hybrid Colloidal Molecules

Colloidal particles have been widely applied as building blocks to fabricate functional materials,as well as model systems to answer fundamental questions. The development of colloidal particle synthesis has been mainly driven for a long time by investigating their properties at a reduced particle size and/or with an anisotropic shape. On the other hand, nowadays, an increasing number of efforts has been directed to the synthesis of particles encoding multiple chemical and eometrical information, i.e. multi-material particles with complex shapes that are also known as hybrid colloids. Controllable integration of multiple materials, and thus functionalities, into a hybrid colloidal particle can enable the creation of novel functional materials. Metallic plasmonic nanoparticles can for instance be combined with catalytic nanoparticles to create plasmonicenhanced sensing devices. Hybrid particles with complex compositions can also introduce directional and specific interactions. These programmable interactions can be used to direct particle assembly into targeted superstructures, which further impart superior properties to the corresponding functional materials.