Concepts in Self‐Assembly

Uniform metal nanostructures with long-range order via three-step hierarchical self-assembly

“…In self-assembly, the size and shape of the resulting structures and the periodicity of structure patterns depend only on the inherent properties and internal interactions of the material that undergoes self-assembly, not on the capability of the tools that the material is processed with. Furthermore, self-assembly is a parallel process-all of the individual nanostructures in a pattern form simultaneously, and thus preparation can be extremely fast and fabrication time is independent of the sample size (1,2). Moreover there is one crucial advantage of nanostructure fabrication by self-assembly that is of particular interest from a fundamental scientific point of view: The nanostructures can be studied in situ during their formation, for example, regarding size-or shape-dependent characteristics or arising interactions and emerging collective phenomena.…”