Functional Surfaces Enable Nanocubes To Self-Assemble
26 June 2008, 11:08
Categories: self-assembly
A recent paper by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Washington in Seattle, details a general method for modifying cubic building blocks with nanoscale dimensions. The study suggests that the surfaces of the blocks can be modified to enable the controlled self-assembly of nanostructures and systems.
“While the use of hydrophobic and hydrophilic self-assembled monolayers (SAM) in self-assembly processes are known, our example is notable in the way we programmed the components and used both hydrophobic and capillary interactions for assembly,” explains Dr. Younan Xia, lead researcher. “This gave us the control to assemble structures with different geometries and sizes. Furthermore, the scale and the extent of the assembly were unusual as we could assemble 100 nm cubes into a three-dimensional cubic array over micron distances, which is something not demonstrated previously.”
Dr. Xia points out that the key concept of self-assembly is that the final structure is usually predetermined by the characteristics of the building blocks: the information that defines a self-assembly process – and thus the final structure – is often coded in the building blocks in the form of shape, topology, or surface functionality. From the possible combinations of hydrophobic and hydrophilic faces, Xia’s team generated five distinct SAM-modified silver nanocubes and assembled them into four different nanostructures and one microstructure.
Posted by: The Editors
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