Abstract
Ever since Watson and Crick1 unravelled the structure of DNA, much interest has been directed towards molecular recognition in natural systems. It has become apparent that many biological processes and chemical reactions are guided by noncovalent bonding interactions, which generate and control the orientation of interacting centres. These features enable biochemical processes to occur with great speed and efficiency. It is only recently that the scientific community has started to take advantage of the principles of Nature and construct unnatural molecular and supramolecular systems designed to exploit the use of noncovalent bonding interactions. The development of this science has given rise to a new field of chemistry — namely supramolecular chemistry.2 One of the main driving forces behind the development of supramolecular chemistry has been the urge to understand how natural supramolecular systems operate, and then to extend this understanding to wholly synthetic molecular and supramolecular architectures with novel functions, such as chemical sensing and information storage.2 Catenanes, rotaxanes and pseudorotaxanes are three classes of molecular and supramolecular structures that have received a great deal of attention recently from the Birmingham group.3 The order inherent within these self-assembled structures makes them ideal for nanometre-scale information storage devices. Many studies have been carried out on the self-assembly, decomplexation and reorganisation of these molecular and supramolecular structures in the solution state. By the use of external stimuli, such as light,4 current,3 pH,5, and the dielectric constant of the solvent,6 precise and delicate control of molecular and supramolecular structure is possible in solution.
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The monolayer and multilayer work described in this paper was performed in collaboration with R.C. Ahuja, P.-L. Caruso, and D. Möbius, at the Max-Planck Institut für Biophysikalische Chemie, Am Fassberg, Postfach 2841, Göttingen, Germany, and with H. Ringsdorf and G. Wildburg, at the Institut für Organische Chemie, Johannes Guttenberg-Universität, J J Becher Weg 18-20, Mainz, Germany. We are greatly indebted to these researchers for their collaboration.
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Preece, J.A., Stoddart, J.F. (1995). Towards Molecular and Supramolecular Devices. In: Welland, M.E., Gimzewski, J.K. (eds) Ultimate Limits of Fabrication and Measurement. NATO ASI Series, vol 292. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0041-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-0041-0_1
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