Self-assembly and the properties of molecular materials

我的研究兴趣集中在固体表面的自组装领域。实验技术的进步使科学家们能够在单个分子的水平上研究自组装。这些调查提供了许多重要问题的答案，并揭示了新的和有趣的问题的存在。获得彻底的理解，从而提高控制自组装现象的可能性，是自下而上纳米技术方法的一个核心问题。在对自组装过程中出现的结构进行清晰描绘方面的许多困难是由于系统的复杂性。这些系统拥有许多自由度（它们可以以许多不同的方式组合在一起）和许多相互竞争的相互作用，这些相互作用组合在一起产生各种各样的最终结果。获得自组装机制全局图像的一种方法是将系统分离成较小的、相对独立的域，这些域可以单独分析。

My research interests have as their focus the field of self-assembly at solid surfaces. Advances in experimental techniques have allowed scientists to investigate self-assembly at the level of individual molecules. These investigations have provided the answers to many important questions, and brought to light the existence of new and interesting questions. Gaining a thorough understanding, and therefore raising the possibility of controlling self-assembly phenomena is a problem of central importance in the bottom-up approach to nanotechnology. Many of the difficulties in developing a clear-cut picture of the structures emerging during self-assembly are due to the complexity of the systems. These systems possess many degrees of freedom (they can come together in many different ways) and many competing interactions which combine to produce a large diversity of final results. One way to get to a global picture of self-assembly mechanisms is to separate systems into smaller, relatively independent domains which can be analyzed individually.