By a strange coincidence, the excellent article by Philip Moriarty entitled ‘Let’s review the peer review process‘ has been published today, 18/04/2013, i.e. exactly 9 years after the publication of the first stripy paper.
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Rapha-z-lab 
Not followed this controversy too closely, but have the authors reported images of topological defects on the NP surface (putting a 2D stripe pattern onto a 3D spherical surface means a minimum of 2 defects)? Following from that, depending on the angle you look at these “stripey” NPs from, some of them should look like archery targets!
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In 2007, they have reported ‘Divalent nanoparticles’ in Science, using an “approach […] based on the functionalization of the polar singularities that must form when a curved surface is coated with ordered monolayers”.
That article includes in its supporting information (fig S6), some STM images supposed to represent lines of particles linked by their poles (fig S6a-b) or with one pole down and one pole up (fig S6c-d). Have a look and let me know what you think…
There is also some discussion of the topological aspects of this problem in those two posts:
(see the long discussion of the latter if you have time! – 43 comments)
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So they think the “stripes” give a beach-ball morphology with stripes of variable width. I was thinking of stripes of a uniform width when desrcribing the archery target. The variable width of stripes should then be clear from all angles and even amplified by the projection of a 3D object onto a 2D surface where pixels at the edge contain a larger particle area than those in the centre of a spherical object. Do they see this? (There was no direct link to the Science paper so couldn’t look directly).
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Sorry Paul, here is the link to the Science paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/315/5810/358.full
STM images are in S6:
Click to access DeVries_SOM.pdf
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I’m not an STM expert I’m afraid. All I see is bright splodges and some horizontal white lines, which I assume as scanning artefacts.
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yes, the white lines are definitely artifacts… and there isn’t much more to see in these pictures.
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Really good point by Paul. Not just that stripes should be at different angles, but why no archery targets? (circles) or curved arcs (45 deg latitude view)?
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