Donut-shaped structures could lead to self-cleaning surfaces
Ben Feringa and colleagues at the University of Groningen evaporated a solution of a chiral poly(isocyanate) to produce films with stable, evenly spaced arrays of toroidal structures on a variety of surfaces and from a variety of solvents.
Producing mesoscale patterns using physical processes, such as solvent drying, is interesting, says Feringa: physical processes can lead to structures not accessible in solution but their formation cannot necessarily be predicted by conventional molecular approaches to self-assembly.
Typically, toroidal structures deposited on a surface by any method show no long-range patterning, explains Feringa. His group demonstrated a large degree of long-range order (> 200 mm), showing that physical processes may provide a useful assembly approach to mesoscale chemistry. They expect that they could modify and control the patterns by drop-casting on surfaces that have been chemically and morphologically structured through self-assembly and lithographic methods.
Original publication: Gregory T. Carroll, Mahthild G. M. Jongejan, Dirk Pijper and Ben L. Feringa, Chem. Sci. 2010.
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