A Self‐Assembling Dendritic Reactor: Versatile Formation of Characteristic Patterns with Nanoscale Dimension. Issue 7 (5th February 2015) - Imaoka, Takane
Abstract Spherical dendrimers with phenylazomethine backbones are modified onto atomically flat mica or graphite substrates with a simple solvent based spin‐coating method, and the resulting surfaces are observed by atomic force microscopy. Especially on the mica substrate, dendrimers form very fine and highly regular patterns with aligned nano‐dot arrays and lines. An important observation is that the interval of each dot or line is ≈400 nm whereas previously reported self‐assembling patterns exhibit longer intervals than 5 μm. It is revealed that spherical dendrimers with relatively low intermolecular interactions without any terminal modifications are suitable for the fine self‐assembling pattern formation. This fact suggests that the regular pattern arises from a physical dissipative structure formation due to a fingering instability induced by Marangoni convection but not by anisotropic intermolecular interactions.