Directed self-organization of nanostructured materials: fudamentals and applications

几千年来，从明显无序的系统中自发出现的有组织的结构一直困扰着人类。1610年，约翰尼斯·开普勒在布拉格他家附近的一座桥上走过一座桥时，观察到袖子上有一片雪花，他意识到，尽管每一片雪花都有非凡的“独特性”，但必须有一个潜在的机制来保持雪花的6重对称性。几周后，他出版了一本名为“新年礼物--关于六角形雪花”的短篇专著，他在书中推理说，整体对称性源于积木的内在对称性--我们现在知道这些是氢/氧分子，确实有一种特殊的倾向堆积在六边形。我们现在非常清楚原子和分子是如何在化学键的电磁力的驱动下自组装成晶体的。然而，有待发现的是，原子和分子凝聚成固体时所经历的力如何在某些条件下驱动高度复杂的结构(雪花)的形成，以及在其他条件下如何驱动简单结构(冰块)的形成。

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.