Seminars Archive

Dynamics of nanostructures: Diffusion, self-assembly, self-organization, DNA dolphins and nano-boxes

Abstract
During the last decade fantastic progress has been made in the emerging area of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Materials whose size is reduced to the nanometer scale are found to exhibit new and unique functional properties both interesting from an academic perspective and useful from an industrial and societal perspective. Advances in the field of imaging at the nanoscale have allowed new insight and new mechanistic understanding, and I will show how the unique aspect of our Aarhus STM has allowed us to record time-resolved, high-resolution STM images, visualized in the form of STM movies, [1-10].
I will first demonstrate how we can obtain unique, new insight into diffusion and transport phenomena associated with surface processes and nanostructures. We can extract quantitative information on: i) Surface diffusion of adatoms and molecules [2-4], ii) Diffusion of vacancies and molecules, for example water molecules on oxide surfaces [7,8].
The self-assembly of Nucleic Acid (NA) base molecules and DNA molecules are particularly interesting as promising building blocks for the bottom-up fabrication of functional supramolecular nanostructures on surfaces[6-10]. The DNA origami method allows us to fold long, single-stranded DNA sequences into arbitrary two- and three-dimensional fully addressable nanostructures with wide-reaching application potential within the emerging area of nanoscience [11,12].

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