Directed self-organization of nanostructured materials: fudamentals and applications

从表面上无序的系统中自发出现的有组织的结构已经困扰了人类数千年。 1610年，约翰内斯·开普勒在布拉格家附近的一座桥上行走时观察到袖子上的雪花，意识到尽管雪花具有显着的“独特性”，但必须存在一种一致的六重对称性的潜在机制，几周后，他出版了一本名为“新年礼物 - 论六角雪花”的简短专着，其中他推断整体对称性源于内在对称性构建块 - 我们现在知道它们是氢/氧分子，它们确实具有堆积成六边形的特殊倾向。我们现在非常清楚原子和分子如何在化学键的电磁力的驱动下自组装成晶体。然而，仍有待发现的是，原子和分子在凝结成固体时所经历的力如何驱动在某些条件下形成高度复杂的结构（雪花），以及在其他条件下形成简单的结构（冰块）。

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.