Control of Self-Assembly with Dynamic Programming

Abstract

The organization of a large collection of particles into an ordered crystalline array is needed for many applications, including pharmaceutical separations, nuclear waste disposal, and optoelectronic metamaterials. Due to improvements in sensing technology, it is now becoming possible to monitor the crystalline state in real time during the crystallization process, and this sensor technology opens up new possibilities for feedback control. Here we monitor the crystalline state and use this data to build an empirical Markov state model. An optimal feedback policy is then calculated using the empirical model along with dynamic programming. Alternatively, the empirical model can be calculated from simulation "data" coming from a detailed many-body simulation. Experimental results demonstrating the method will be presented for molecular crystallization and colloidal crystallization.