Structural phases of colloids interacting via a flat-well potential.

Using Langevin dynamics simulations we investigate the self-assembly of colloidal particles in two dimensions interacting via an isotropic potential, which comprises both a hard-core repulsion and an additional softened square-well potential of controllable width α. In dilute concentrations, the particles assemble in small clusters with a well-defined crystalline order. For small values of α the particles form triangular lattices. As α is increased, more particles can be captured by the potential well giving rise to different crystalline symmetries and the structural phase transitions between them. The main structures observed are triangular, square, and a mixture of square and triangular cells forming an Archimedean tiling. In the concentrated regime the particles form a single percolated cluster with essentially the same orderings at the same ranges of α values as observed in the dilute regime, thus showing that cluster boundary effects have a minor influence on the cluster crystal symmetry. By using energy analysis and geometry arguments we discuss how the different observed structures minimize the system energy at different values of α.