Nano World: Where towers construct themselves

Imagine a tower builds itself into the desired structure only by choosing the appropriate bricks. Absurd - and however, in the nano world this is reality: There an unordered crowd of components can initiate the formation of an ordered structure - a process known as self-assembly. The physicists Christos Likos (University of Vienna), Emanuela Bianchi and Gerhard Kahl (both Vienna University of Technology) investigate how they can control the ordering of such self-assembling structures and found out how to switch the assembly process on and off. The results are now published in the high-impact journal "Nano Letters". Materials with specific properties at the nanoand micro-scale level are heavily sought after due to the broad spectrum of applications in electronics, photovoltaics and biomimetic material synthesis. For many of these applications, mesoscopic crystalline structures are often needed and hence scientists have to deal with the challenge of developing reliable, efficient and cheap methods to produce target structures with specific symmetries and physical properties. Nowadays, rather than relying on externally-controlled tools, most of the fabrication methods are based on the self-assembly of carefully chosen/synthesized base units.