Nonequilibrium speed-up of multi-target self-assembly

Many biological systems rely on the ability to self-assemble different target structures using the same set of components. Equilibrium self-assembly suffers from a limited capacity in this case, due to increasing number of decoy states with increasing number of targets encoded. Moreover, increasing the kinetic stability of a target comes at a price of introducing kinetic traps, leading to slower assembly. Using a toy physical model of interacting particles, we demonstrate that local driving can improve both the assembly times and kinetic stability of multi-target self-assembly. Our results illustrate the role that nonequilibrium drive plays in overcoming trade-offs that are inherent to equilibrium assemblies.