Dynamics of Brownian Assembly

Abstract

In Chapter 2, we discussed the chemistry of the covalent bond—or intramolecular chemistry. In this chapter, we discuss intermolecular chemistry—the chemistry of molecule-molecule interactions. A few of the types of interactions from intermolecular chemistry are: solvation, molecular recognition, molecular transport, molecular self-organization (e.g., bilayer formation), photoresponsive phenomena, and organic semiconductivity. The approach to developing the first generation of molecular nanotech-nology systems is assumed in this book to consist in combining solutions and allowing statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, and microscopic interactions to take care of the details of assembly. In this chapter, we discuss these interactions in detail.