  Fabrication of diamond structures by self-assembly is a fundamental challenge
in making three-dimensional photonic crystals. We simulate a system of model
hard particles with attractive patches and show that they can self-assemble
into a diamond structure from an initially disordered state. We quantify the
extent to which the formation of the diamond structure can be facilitated by
"seeding" the system with small diamond crystallites or by introducing a
rotation interaction to mimic a carbon-carbon antibonding interaction. Our
results suggest patchy particles may serve as colloidal "atoms" and "molecules"
for the bottom-up self-assembly of three-dimensional crystals.
