Supramolecular self-assembly of 1-10nm templates for biofunctional surfaces, quantum information processing and nanoelectronics

纳米技术关注的是在非常小的尺度上——与单个分子或原子的大小相当——对材料特性和过程的控制。多年来，开发新技术来实现这种控制水平一直是一个活跃的研究领域，很明显，这些发展将带来许多技术上的好处。也许这些好处中最明显的例子是计算机速度和内存的不断提高，这对社会产生了巨大的影响，这是制造更小电子元件的能力的直接结果。制造小型纳米级结构的传统方法被称为“自上而下”。在这种方法中，起点是采用一个大对象，并使用各种技术将其加工成较小的对象。例如，人们可以从硅表面开始，在表面上形成尺寸非常小的特征——实际上，控制计算机的硅微处理器就是这样制造的。在我们的申请中，我们提出了一种革命性的技术，可以归类为“自下而上”的纳米技术。这里的方法几乎与“自顶向下”的方法相反，因为对象是由比结果结构更小的组件构建的。一个日常的例子是用更小的积木——砖块建造的房子！在我们的例子中，构建块是单个分子，但是，与日常例子不同的是，我们的分子块可以被设计或编程为相互作用，以便它们自发地形成感兴趣的结构。这个过程被称为“自组装”，是通过在分子中加入一些特殊的基团来实现的，这些基团促进相互作用，控制邻近分子的排列和位置。在我们的工作中，我们使用氢键相互作用——将许多生命分子（如蛋白质和DNA）结合在一起的力量。到目前为止，我们制造的“自组装”结构相对简单——表面上的分子蜂窝状网络。在这些网络中，一个分子形成蜂巢的边缘，另一个分子形成蜂巢的顶点。最重要的是，蜂窝的空隙间距非常小——大约3.5纳米，相当于几十个原子，或者大约3个大分子，比如巴基球——可以通过选择边缘分子来控制。值得注意的是，我们发现蜂窝网络的孔洞可以用其他材料以可控的方式填充，因此它们提供了一种实现纳米技术引入的中心目标的方法——将材料控制到单分子的规模。我们现在建议将这一发现发展成一种技术方法，使用相同的方法形成一系列新的纳米级网络，并使用这些结构作为模板来控制生物技术，电子和计算/量子信息处理的新形式的新材料的特性-这是基于量子波函数的可控混合。这项工作将把制造所需的特殊分子的化学家和研究这些分子在自组装过程中结合方式的物理学家聚集在一起。其他对电子材料、生物学和量子计算感兴趣的科学家将加入这些科学家的行列——这些团体将利用这些网络进行科学和技术示范应用。到项目结束时，我们的目标是开发出具有不同尺寸、强度和化学性质的完善网络的方法，并希望将这种模板技术提供给学术界和工业界的更广泛的科学家和工程师社区。

Nanotechnology is concerned with the control of material properties and processes on a very small scale - comparable with the size of single molecules or atoms. The development of new techniques to achieve this level of control has been an active area of research for many years and it has become clear that there are many technological benefits which will follow from these developments. Perhaps the most obvious example of these benefits is the progressive increase in speed and memory of computers which has had enormous impact on society and is a direct result of the ability to manufacture ever smaller electronic components. The traditional approach to making small, nanoscale, structures is known as 'top-down'. In this approach the starting point is to take a large object and use various technologies to process it into smaller objects. For example one might start with a silicon surface and form features on the surface which have very small dimensions - in fact this is how a silicon microprocessor which controls a computer is manufactured. In our application we propose a revolutionary technology which may be classified as a 'bottom-up' nanotechnology. Here the approach is almost the opposite to the 'top-down' approach in that an object is built out of components which are smaller than the resulting structure. An everyday example would be a house which is built of smaller building blocks - bricks! The building blocks in our case would be single molecules, but, unlike the everyday example, our molecular bricks may be designed or programmed to interact with each other so that they spontaneously form structures of interest. This process is known as 'self-assembly' and is achieved by incorporating in the molecule some special groups which promote interactions to control the alignment and position of neighbouring molecules. In our work we use hydrogen bonding interactions - the forces which hold together many of the molecules of life such as proteins and DNA.The 'self-assembled' structures we have made so far have been relatively simple - honeycomb networks of molecules sitting on a surface. In these networks one molecule forms the honeycomb edge and another the vertex. Most importantly the spacing of the voids of the honeycomb is very small - about 3.5 nanometres, equivalent to a few tens of atoms or alternatively about 3 large molecules such as buckyballs - and can be controlled through the choice of edge molecules. Remarkably, we have found that the holes of the honeycomb network can be filled up in a controlled manner with other materials and they therefore offer a way of achieving the central goal of nanotechnology introduced above - control of materials down to the scale of single molecules. We are now proposing to develop this discovery into a technological approach to forming a whole range of new nanoscale networks using the same approach and using these structures as templates to control the properties of new materials for biotechnology, electronics and a new form of computing / quantum information processing - which is based on the controllable mixing of quantum wave functions. The work will bring together chemists who will make the specialised molecules which are required and physicists who will study the way in which these molecules combine in the self assembly process. These scientists will be joined by others who have interests in electronic materials, biology and quantum computing - these groups will use the networks for scientific and technological demonstrator applications. By the end of the project we aim to have developed the means of perfecting networks with different dimensions, strengths, and chemical properties and hope to make this templating technology available to a much wider community of scientists and engineers in academia and industry.