Soft materials on the nanoscale

技术正在推动器件生产，并要求对纳米级材料的理解。也许令人惊讶的是，即使我们对块状材料有了详细的了解，也不意味着我们对相同材料的纳米级样品有类似的了解。事实上，肯定有纳米级材料行为甚至无法从整体性质预测的例子。这种缺乏理解的情况在玻璃质材料中最为普遍，我们甚至不能声称对玻璃质材料有大量的理解。这种与“预期”行为的偏差通常在所谓的软材料（聚合物、胶体、蛋白质、玻璃）中最为明显。其原因是这些材料通常具有明显大于简单原子或分子晶体固体的特征长度尺度。玻璃态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，几乎同样存在争议。我们提出了一套实验，有巨大的希望，以减轻所有现有的争议，也导致一个彻底的了解纳米玻璃材料。我们还建议开发一个过程中，相当常见的实验技术可以用来探测吸附到生物材料上的蛋白质的深度依赖性。

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.