Center for Functional Nanomaterials Seminar

Bottom-up synthesis methods suggest a path towards the growth of advanced and designable nano-materials. Central to the success of these methods is the ability to understand and control the film-molecule and the intermolecular interactions on an atomic scale. One compelling method to initiate the growth of nano-structured materials is to employ the natural tendency of layered thin films of dissimilar materials to form ordered arrays of misfit dislocation networks. On such systems, the self-assembly is driven by strain relaxation in the metal film. Another avenue is to use the intermolecular interactions to form ordered molecular arrays, where designed molecules yield predictable structures. This talk will focus on few systems highlighting such self-assembly processes. I will compare the different self-assembly mechanisms of molecules on strained metallic films of Ag on Ru(0001).
Both growth processes are generally applicable to many functionalized C60 molecules, thus opening avenues towards complex and designable self-assembled structures based on a lock-and-key type approach.

This work was supported by the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center for High-rate Nanomanufacturing (NSF NSEC-425826). Partial support has been provided by the NSF-NIRT grant ECS-0506309.