Our paper Double-Lattice Packing of Pentagonal Gold Bipyramids in Supercrystals with Triclinic Symmetry has just been published in Advanced Materials! Congratulations to all involved, and in particular to first author Jieli Lyu for her unrelenting focus (and the countless hours spent!) on improving the quality of the nanoparticle batches and of their assemblies.
We solve the fundamental packing problem for this particular object and, guided by numerical simulations, we try to extend the result to similar shapes in order to understand the delicate balance between the inversion symmetry (or lack thereof) of the particles, the complexity of the supercrystal lattice and the packing fraction. Unexpectedly, we detect a strongly facet-dependent optical response of the assemblies.
