Nanoscale Mosaic Works: Tetragonal Lattices of Iso-Oriented Heterogeneous Nanocubes.

Tetragonal 2D lattices are spontaneously formed by the self-assembly of homogeneous nanocubes. However, ordered arrays consisting of differently sized rectangular nanoblocks have not been achieved because the regulation of the assembly is weakened by the combination of binary units. In the present work, ordered arrays comprising binary nanocubes were investigated using the combination of 10 nm Pt nanocubes and 20 nm BaTiO3 nanocubes. Heterogeneous but ordered 2D tetragonal lattices were successfully produced using differently sized rectangular nanoblocks. The highly ordered self-assembly in the heterogeneous system requires the matching of the size ratio of binary nanocubes with the buffer effect of oleic acid covering the building units.