Building Block and Self-Assembly Design with Magnetic Handshake Materials

Inspired by nature's ability of self-assembling intricate materials, we recently developed a self-assembly platform that can create specific binding by encoding magnetic dipole patterns into panel-like building blocks. With this platform, which we term magnetic handshake materials, we are able to achieve controlled polymerization, complementary binding strands and 3D folding from 2D nets. However, in order to perform more systematic materials design that can match nature's ability, we need to develop a design framework that can not only search through the high dimensional parameter space more efficiently, but also define the design limits of our magnetic building blocks. Here, I will present a design protocol inspired by information theory that can provide us the upper limit of the number of distinct building blocks for a given design complexity, and then show how to use these building blocks to self-assemble structures with non-trivial geometry and topology.