Directed Self-Assembly of Materials Workshop
Directed Self-Assembly of Materials Workshop
September 28, 2011 - October 1, 2011
Gaylord Opryland Hotel - Nashville, Tennessee
The bottoms-up design and assembly of materials offers the opportunity for achieving exquisite control over the local chemistry and properties of a material, and thereby potentially enhancing our ability to engineer greater functionality and design complexity into future material systems. Nature provides clear examples of the efficacy of this approach, as well as some of its limitations. Recent research has demonstrated the feasibility of using tailored interactions between small molecules to drive the assembly of inorganic nanoparticles and biological entities (e.g. DNA and proteins) into larger assemblies that can extend over multiple length scales. Similarly, dynamic assembly processes have been studied in which the bonding and network structures can undergo disassembly and reassembly in route to reaching their final desired state. However, the design and sequential assembly of complex 3D structures that culminates in hierarchically structured materials with specifically targeted properties and/or engineered dynamic responses still remains well beyond our grasp. This workshop reviewed the current state-of-the-art in the directed self assembly of materials, and then sought to identify breakthrough strategies and enabling technologies (both theoretical and experimental) that will facilitate the design and massive self assembly of multi-component 3D structures with precisely engineered electronic and optical properties.
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