Dynamical phase transition in the growth of programmable polymorphic materials

In conventional materials design problems, the possibility of assembling alternative crystal structures from a single set of subunits is disadvantageous. By contrast, multicomponent systems with programmable interactions can in principle be designed to assemble into multiple distinct crystal structures on purpose, opening up the possibility of selecting a specific encoded polymorph on demand by growing the crystal from an initial seed. Here the authors describe the conditions under which seeded polymorphic self-assembly is dynamically stable, and they identify a nonequilibrium phase transition that fundamentally limits the number of unique polymorphs that can be encoded in this way.