|
The fabrication, characterization and manipulation of nanosystems brings together physics, chemistry, materials science and biology in an unprecedented way, Phenomena occurring in such systems are fundamental to the workings of electronic devices, but also to living organisms. The ability to fabricate nanostructures is essential in the further development of functional devices that incorporate nanoscale features. Even more essential is the ability to introduce a wide range of chemical and materials flexibility into these structures to build up more complex nanostructures that can ultimately rival biological nanosystems. In this respect, polymers are potentially ideal nanoscale building blocks because of their length scale, well-defined architecture, controlled synthesis, ease of processing and wide range of chemical functionality that can be incorporated. In this presentation, we will look at a number of promising polymer-based nanofabrication strategies that have been developed recently, with an emphasis on those techniques that incorporate nanostructured polymers into devices and that exploit intrinsic polymer properties.
|