Yasutaka Nagaoka, Timothy C. Moore, Arseniy Epishin, Liu Z, Tong Cai, Na Jin, Ken Seungmin Hong, Péter Sághy, A Y Wang, Yuzi Liu, Sooyeon Hwang, Yusong Bai, Shengli Zou, Ruipeng Li, Stephanie Reich, Sharon C. Glotzer, Ou Chen
In nanoscale assemblies, observations of structures in the transition pathways between high-symmetry lattices are rare because of the inherent instability of the intermediate phases. We report that silver nanocrystals with shapes similar to truncated octahedra (mecons) self-assemble into superlattices that are stable and resemble a previously unobserved phase that bridges face-centered and body-centered cubic structures along the Nishiyama-Wassermann martensitic pathway. These superlattices exhibited high structural purity and stability and created a robust and tunable dissymmetric phase landscape. Notably, light-matter coupling emerged in these silver nanocrystal superlattices through plasmon-photon hybridization at the quantum level.