Recent advances in experimental techniques to synthesise particles with non-convex shapes have provided new challenges and opportunities to the modelling community. The availability of such building blocks has motivated many computational studies on the formation of new materials driven by such complex effects as interpenetration, interlocking, and shape complementarity that, if properly harnessed, have the potential of acting as entropic directional (patchy) interactions in particles with non-convex geometries. This article highlights recent molecular simulation studies of anisotropic non-convex colloidal particles with particular emphasis in particles interacting via excluded volume.

用于合成具有非凸形状的粒子的实验技术的最新进展为建模社区提供了新的挑战和机遇。这种积木的可用性激发了许多新研究的形成，这些新研究是由互穿，互锁和形状互补等复杂效应驱动的新材料的形成，如果适当利用它们，它们有可能在粒子中充当熵方向（斑纹）相互作用具有非凸的几何形状。本文重点介绍了各向异性非凸胶体粒子的最新分子模拟研究，特别强调了通过排除体积相互作用的粒子。