Third Party Funds Group - Sub project
Acronym: B4
Start date : 01.04.2026
End date : 31.03.2031
Project B4 aims to develop hierarchically-structured materials based on colloidal clusters. It requires establishing correlative and scale-bridging tomographic workflows to unravel structure-property relations, using structural color as an emergent functionality. We will leverage our expertise in colloidal chemistry and physics to create highly-defined colloidal clusters via con-fined colloidal self-assembly. These colloidal clusters will serve as complex building blocks to form hierarchical materials with defined structural arrangements at the nano- and micro-scale (Figure 1). We will start with uniform spherical particles and focus on the assembly of the colloidal clusters. Subsequently, we will transition to elliptical particles with varying aspect ratios, and ulti-mately to polydisperse dispersions with the goal to induce defined gradients within the individual colloidal clusters (Figure 1). The project will focus on establishing methods for the scale-bridging structural and optical characterization by combining correlative micro-spectroscopy (B4), electron tomography (B2), nanoCT (B2) and μCT (B3), as well as scattering methods (P). The refractive index, and thus the photonic stop band, will be further controlled by defined deposition of inorganic layers (A4) to tailor the macroscopic optical properties.