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，即使我们对大块材料有了详细的了解，但这并不意味着我们对相同材料的纳米级样品有了类似的了解。事实上，确实有一些例子，纳米级材料的行为甚至不能从体性质来预测。这种缺乏理解的现象在玻璃材料中最为普遍，我们甚至不能宣称对其有大量的理解。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结晶固体的特征长度尺度。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，但几乎同样存在争议。我们提出了一组有巨大希望的实验，以减轻所有现有的争议，并导致对纳米玻璃材料的透彻理解。我们还建议开发一种过程，其中相当常见的实验技术可用于探测吸附在生物材料上的蛋白质的深度依赖特性。

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.