Organic–inorganic nanosystems

A natural goal of most nanoscience projects, independent of the specific subfield they belong to, is to create a system providing novel functions which originate from the properties of its constituent nanoscale parts. Although the preparation of individual nanoobjects such as dots or wires of various materials is in principle possible, the analysis of their chemical and physical properties still poses a serious experimental challenge. Thus, to arrive at a certain minimum level of signal strength for a given analysis technique, in most cases ensembles of nanoobjects are needed. However, this immediately results in the requirement for a narrow size distribution of the nanoobjects, else their desired new size dependent properties will be completely smeared out. Additional conditions such as control of the chemical composition of the structures or of their spatial arrangement add further difficulties to the preparation. Finally, excluding time consuming, and thus costly, sequential top-down methods, one is almost naturally led to self-organizing bottomup processes.