Directed self-organization of nanostructured materials: fudamentals and applications

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The spontaneous emergence of organized structures from apparently disordered systems has baffled humans for millennia. In 1610 Johannes Kepler, upon observing a snowflake on his sleeve while walking over a bridge near his home in Prague, realized that there must be an underlying mechanism for the consistent 6-fold symmetry of snowflakes in spite of each's remarkable 'uniqueness', and several weeks later he published a short monograph called 'A New Year's Gift - On the six-cornered Snowflake' in which he reasons that the overall symmetry results from an intrinsic symmetry of the building blocks - we now know these to be hydrogen/oxygen molecules that do have a particular tendency to stack in hexagons. We now know quite well how atoms and molecules self-assemble into crystals, driven by the electromagnetic forces of chemical bonding. What remains to discover, however, is how the forces experienced by atoms and molecules as they condense into a solid drive the formation of highly complex structures (snowflakes) under some conditions, and simple structures (ice cubes) under others.