Recent advances have pushed the limits of lithography firmly into the sub-100 nm domain, with smallest feature sizes around 10 nm. However, compared to living organisms, devices fabricated using nanolithography are not nearly as complex, as they are essentially 2D and contain only a limited number of chemical elements. For centuries, Nature has been a major inspiration for science. First of all to learn how Life functions at cellular level, but increasingly, as a blueprint for designing non-natural devices where the building blocks and their assembly are inspired by biological examples. The key tool in translating these examples into the domain of engineering, has been self-assembly or self-organization. This book gathers a spectrum researchers who have not only furthered our knowledge of self-assembly using small molecules, polymers and colloidal particles as building blocks, but who have also shown it to be a practical tool in the assembly of an astonishing variety of devices, ranging from molecular electronics to biosensors.

Zusammenfassung

Nanotechnology has received tremendous interest over the last decade, not only from the scientific community but also from a business perspective and from the general public. Although nanotechnology is still at the largely unexplored frontier of science, it has the potential for extremely exciting technological innovations that will have an enormous impact on areas as diverse as information technology, medicine, energy supply and probably many others. The miniturization of devices and structures will impact the speed of devices and information storage capacity. More importantly, though, nanotechnology should lead to completely new functional devices as nanostructures have fundamentally different physical properties that are governed by quantum effects. When nanometer sized features are fabricated in materials that are currently used in electronic, magnetic, and optical applications, quantum behavior will lead to a set of unprecedented properties. The interactions of nanostructures with biological materials are largely unexplored. Future work in this direction should yield enabling technologies that allows the study and direct manipulation of biological processes at the (sub) cellular level.

Inhalt
Structure Formation in Polymer Films From Micrometer to the sub-100 nm Length Scales.- Functional Nanostructured Polymers Incorporation of Nanometer Level Control in Device Design.- Electronic Transport through Self-Assembled Monolayers.- Nanostructured Hydrogen-Bonded Rosette Assemblies Self-Assembly and Self-Organization.- Self-Assembled Molecular Electronics.- Multivalent Ligand-Receptor Interactions on Planar Supported Membranes An On-Chip Approach.- Aggregation of Amphiphiles as a Tool to Create Novel Functional Nano-Objects.- Self-Assembly of Colloidal Building Blocks into Complex and Controllable Structures.- Self-Assembly and Nanostructured Materials.