Bifunctional Janus Spheres with Chemically Orthogonal Patches.

Bifunctional Janus particles with patches carrying orthogonal surface functionalities that can be independently modified are widely seen as promising building blocks for the bottom-up assembly of functional materials due to their full compositional and geometrical programmability. However, synthesis of these colloids remains an elusive task as current scalable procedures are generally limited to monofunctional particles only. Herein, a scalable bulk wet-chemical synthetic method for fabricating bifunctional Janus particles following a two-step dispersion polymerization is developed.

Wet-Chemical Synthesis of Chiral Colloids.

We disclose a method for the synthesis of chiral colloids from spontaneously formed hollow sugar-surfactant microtubes with internally confined mobile colloidal spheres. Key feature of our approach is the grafting of colloid surfaces with photoresponsive coumarin moieties, which allow for UV-induced, covalent clicking of colloids into permanent chains, with morphologies set by the colloid-to-tube diameter ratio. Subsequent dissolution of tube confinement yields aqueous suspensions that comprise bulk quantities of a variety of linear chains, including single helical chains of polystyrene colloids.