| Abstract
| - We investigate the self-assembly of anisotropic cone-shaped particles decorated by ringlike attractive “patches”.In a recent paper, we demonstrated that the self-assembled clusters, which arise due to the conical particle's anisotropicshape combined with directional attractive interactions, are precise for certain cluster sizes, resulting in a precisepacking sequence of clusters of increasing sizes with decreasing cone angles (Chen et al. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.2007, 104, 717−722). Here we explore the dependence of cluster packing on the cone angle and cooling rate anddiscuss the “stability” and “metastability” of the resulting structures as well as polymorphism of non-“magic-number”clusters. We investigate large clusters of cones and discuss the implication of our simulation results in the contextof the Israelachvili packing rule for surfactants and a recent geometrical packing analysis on hard cones in the limitof large numbers of cones.
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