Soft materials on the nanoscale

技术正在推动设备生产，并要求在纳米尺度上理解材料。也许令人惊讶的是，即使我们对一种大宗材料有了详细的了解，但这并不意味着我们对同一材料的纳米级样品也有类似的理解。事实上，确实有一些例子表明，纳米材料的行为甚至无法从块状属性中预测出来。这种缺乏理解的情况在玻璃材料中最为普遍，我们甚至不能声称对这种材料有大量的理解。对于所谓的软材料(聚合物、胶体、蛋白质、玻璃)而言，这种偏离“预期”行为的情况往往最为明显。原因是这些材料通常具有比简单的原子或分子晶体固体大得多的特征长度尺度。玻璃聚合物薄膜的研究具有很高的技术重要性，一直是许多研究的主题--也几乎同样有争议。我们提出了一系列实验，这些实验极有希望缓解所有现有的争议，并导致对纳米玻璃材料的彻底理解。我们还建议开发一种过程，其中相当常见的实验技术可以用来探索蛋白质吸附在生物材料上的深度相关性质。

Technology is pushing device production and demanding material understanding on the nanoscale. It is perhaps surprising that even when we have a detailed understanding of a bulk material that does not mean we have a similar understanding for nanoscale samples of the same material. In fact there are certainly examples where the nanoscale material behaviour would not even be predictable from bulk properties. This dearth of understanding is most prevalent for glassy material for which we can not even claim an understanding in bulk. Such deviations from "expected" behaviour is often most pronounced for what are called soft materials (polymers, colloids, proteins, glasses). The reason for this is that these materials often have characteristic length scales that are significantly larger than those of simple atomic or molecular crystalline solids. The study of glassy polymer films is one of high technological importance and has been the subject of much study - and almost equal controversy. We propose a set of experiments that has tremendous promise to alleviate all of the existing controversy, and also lead to a thorough understanding of nanoscopic glassy materials. We also propose to develop a process where fairly common experimental techniques can be used to probe the depth dependent properties of protein adsorbed onto biomaterials.