Controlling the anisotropic self-assembly of polybutadiene-grafted silica nanoparticles by tuning three-body interaction forces Di Credico, Barbara Moncho Jordá, Arturo Recently, the significant improvements in polymer composites properties have been mainly attributed to the ability of filler nanoparticles (NPs) to self-assemble into highly anisotropic self-assembled structures. In this work, we investigate the self-assembly of core–shell NPs composed of a silica core grafted with polybutadiene (PB) chains, generating the so-called ‘‘hairy’’ NPs (HNPs), immersed in tetrahydrofuran solvent. While uncoated silica beads aggregate forming uniform compact structures, the presence of a PB shell affects the silica NPs organization to the point that by increasing the polymer density at the corona, they tend to self-assemble into linear chain-like structures. To reproduce the experimental observations, we propose a theoretical model for the two-body that considers the van der Waals attractive energy together with the polymer-induced repulsive steric contribution and includes an additional three-body interaction term. This term arises due to the anisotropic distribution of PB, which increases their concentration near the NPs contact region. The resulting steric repulsion experienced by a third NP approaching the dimer prevents its binding close to the dimer bond and favors the growth of chain-like structures. We find good agreement between the simulated and experimental self-assembled superstructures, confirming that this three-body steric repulsion plays a key role in determining the cluster morphology of these core–shell NPs. The model also shows that further increasing the grafting density leads to low-density gel-like open structures. 2022-11-02T13:22:32Z 2022-11-02T13:22:32Z 2022-10-04 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Soft Matter, 2022, 18, 8034. DOI: [10.1039/d2sm00943a] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/77706 10.1039/d2sm00943a eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional Royal Society of Chemistry