About half a century ago, Richard Feynman gave his prophetic lecture “Plenty of Room at the Bottom”. He outlined in this talk the foundations of nanoscience, and the promise that totally synthetic constructions could eventually be built with molecular scale precision. Nanoscience research has been rapidly increasing across the globe during the past decade. It is now widely accepted by the scientific, industrial, government and business communities, that nanoscience will be of integral importance in the development of future technologies. Nanoscience is being touted as the engine that will drive next industrial revolution.
One of the hallmarks of nanoscience is its interdisciplinary nature - its practice requires chemists, physicists, materials scientists, engineers and biologists to work together in close-knit teams. Communication and collaboration between disciplines will enable the most challenging scientific problems to be tackled, those that are most pressing in the successful exploitation of nanotechnology. This is a daunting challenge for students, researchers, managers, funding agencies and politicians, as the field of nanoscience is so diverse and evolving rapidly. These difficulties are exacerbated by the fact that few textbooks on nanoscience have existed that bring together the vast range of published work in an accessible primer for students and practitioners of this topic.
“Nanochemistry - A Chemical Approach To Nanomaterials ”, has been written through the eye of chemistry in an attempt to fill this void. The content of the book has been selected and organized to establish the basic principles of nanoscience through the subject of nanochemistry. Because of the interdisciplinary approach adopted by the authors, the book should be useful to a broad readership even though the fundamental science and applications will continue to change almost on a daily basis.
Nanoscience today is a creative amalgamation of bottom-up chemistry and top-down engineering techniques. We are currently witnessing an explosion of novel ideas and strategies for making and manipulating, visualizing and interrogating nanoscale materials and structures. An aim of the book is to describe the concepts and methods developed for synthesizing a range of nanoscale building blocks with strictly controlled size, shape, bulk and surface structure and composition, and properties. A further aim is to explain how these nanoscale construction units can be organized and integrated into functional architectures using a combination of self-assembly, templating, chemical lithography, and other patterning methods.
Nanochemistry will be a valuable textbook for students planning an academic or industrial research career in any area related to nanoscience and nanotechnology. It provides a global perspective of the subject of nanochemistry, written with sufficient breadth and depth to make it suitable as the basis of an advanced undergraduate course in chemistry or a graduate course in materials chemistry, engineering materials science, solid state physics and nanoscience. Much of the subject matter presented in the book can be readily adapted to introduce chemical aspects of nanoscience to a broad audience of undergraduates in their first three years at university. This text should provide a readily accessible road map of nanochemistry, beginning with its roots and extending to its branches, emphasizing throughout the connection of ideas from discovery to application from within and between the science disciplines. It provides a unique perspective on nanoscience and nanotechnology, an attribute which will make it invaluable for those witnessing, participating in, and trying to remain at the leading-edge of the nanoscience explosion. These include scientists, managers in university and industry, government workers, business people, even the media.
In the first textbook on nanochemistry, Arsenault and Ozin describe the methods used by chemists to make nanoscale building blocks and the techniques that can arrange them into functional architectures. Primary building blocks have dimensions spanning nanometers to micrometers, and can be made of almost all conceivable materials. Their assembly into a particular arrangement can be driven by forces acting between them, or directed by specific interactions with a structure-guiding template or patterned substrate. Like Nature's biomineral construction units, these primary building blocks can associate into secondary structures and this organization scheme can continue until the highest level of complexity is reached. This introduces the notion of building blocks assembling over multiple length scales as a way of making materials with hierarchical structures and complex form. Hierarchy allows a material to satisfy several, sometimes conflicting, sets of conditions and demands in a single material. How this relates to Nature's way of creating structures introduces important connections between molecular recognition and epitaxy, crystal growth and form, unifying ideas in coordination, bioinorganic, materials and solid-state chemistry.
The book Nanochemistry begins by exploring the basic tenets of self-assembly, and continues into some insightful nineteenth century research of Pieter Harting on synthetic morphology, Ernst Haeckel and D'Arcy Thompson on morphogenesis and Emil Fischer on the lock-and-key principle of molecular recognition. These classic studies relate in turn to twentieth century research of Richard Barrer on template directed self-assembly of microporous materials, Hientz Lowenstam on organic matrix mediated formation of biominerals and Jean-Marie Lehn on supramolecular chemistry. Ideas and methods stemming from this pioneering work provide a springboard for the development of the twenty first century emerging field of nanochemistry.
Continuing on this flow of ideas, the book explores the genealogy of chemical discoveries that lead to the development of nanochemistry. The tool kit of nanochemistry is described in terms of the integration of concepts and methods in chemical lithography, templating, materials chemistry and self-assembly. The underlying theme is how different patterning and templating methods spanning the scale of microns to nanometers can be creatively fused with synthesis and self-assembly of sheet, wire, tube, rod, cluster, solid and hollow sphere and hemisphere, polymer, spiral and ring building blocks to make new materials and structures. The goal is to create functional nanostructures with perceived utility in such areas as electronics, magnetics and photonics, batteries, solar cells and fuel cells, catalysis and sensing, chemical storage and release. In fact, in a few years time it will be difficult to find products and technologies which have not been significantly advanced by nanoscience.
At the end of every chapter the reader is challenged with “Nanofood for thought”, a collection of questions often without clear-cut answers that have been designed to inspire creative and holistic thought and facilitate a connection of ideas about the materials and methods described throughout the book. “Nanofood for thought" will hopefully serve not only to enhance the readers understanding of the underlying physicochemical principles of nanochemistry but also suggest new ways and means for the reader to approach and solve basic and directed research problems in their own area of nanoscience.
The book culminates by posing the provocative question “What comes next?”. Some fanciful thoughts are offered on how to think about assembling the future beyond the nanochemistry presented in this textbook.
Finally, a series of practical experiments in nanochemistry is explored, to enable students and researchers to roll up their sleeves in the “Nanolab”, make matter that matters, and invent materials of the next kind!