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Publication

Molecular self-assembly under 2D lateral nanoconfinement: Capabilities and prospects

Book - Dissertation

Molecular self-assembly is omnipresent. Think about the DNA molecules in your body or soap dissolving fat. However, fundamental knowledge about the early self-assembly stages is limited and hinders controlling the process at will, sought after in numerous fields of applications. To that end, confinement of self-assembly has emerged as a strategy to obtain more insight into the early stages. Our group has developed a two-dimensional confinement approach where molecular self-assembly is forced into small spaces, or nanocorrals, on a covalently modified surface. In this thesis, the current capabilities of the approach were demonstrated and new additions to the method were developed, enabling multiple new prospects. We showed that the addition of chemisorbed species on the surface and the presence of an impurity can respectively add more or less disorder for an aperiodic tiling system. For multicomponent systems, confinement induced strain on a three-component network, enabled access to the early self-assembly events of a two-component system, granting polymorphic control, and revealed that no single aligned domains form inside nanocorrals upon adding a second competing component. Two different routes were presented to incorporate more flexibility in the confinement approach. In the first route, an atomic force microscope replaces the scanning tunneling microscope for corral fabrication and the subsequent study of the confined network. In the second approach, iodonium salts were used instead of diazonium salts, expanding the library of available functionalities at the surface.
Publication year:2022
Accessibility:Open