Nanofabrication with nanoparticles

An impressive variety of nano building blocks, including nanospheres, nanorods, nanocubes, nanoplates, nanotetrapods, and nanoprisms, exists and continues to grow with breakthroughs in synthesis techniques. The application of nanotechnology to areas such as photonics and electronics, chemical and biological sensors, energy storage, and catalysis requires the manipulation of these nano-objects into functional materials and devices, and this remains a fundamental challenge. Self-assembly is generally regarded as the most promising means for designing and controlling the bottom up assembly of nanometer-scale objects into structures such as sheets, tubes, wires, and shells needed as scaffolds and structures for catalysis, hydrogen storage, nanoelectronic devices, and drug delivery.1 For example, DNA-functionalized AuNPs could be assembled into highly-ordered BCC and FCC crystal structures. This work demonstrated the ability to create two distinct colloidal crystals using the same nanoparticle building blocks while varying only the DNA linkers.2 Or, plasmonic nanocrystal molecules could be constructed via the polymerization of organic surface ligands grafted on the nanoparticle surface.3 In this lecture an overview of the strategies to functionalized nano building blocks in a controlled fashion with a diversity of tethers, that enable specific and nonspecific interactions to direct their assembly will be presented.