Recent advances in the fabrication of nanotemplates from supramolecular self-organization

The use of self-assembling materials, including block copolymers, colloids, surfactants and supramolecular materials, has had a profound impact on the fabrication of nanopatterned surfaces. Despite receiving intense attention, and unlike when other self-assembling methods are employed, the construction of nanoscale templates from supramolecular materials, such as dendrimers, discotics, rod–coils and liquid-crystals, is critically limited by the lack of long-range order and orientation of the materials as well as the methodology for creating lithographic templates. This review focuses on recent progress that has been made in developing strategies that can be used to create supramolecular templates from a large number of supramolecular units with unique size and shape based on supramolecular self-organization. The large number of approaches that have been devised to control order and orientation of supramolecular structures as part of nano-fabrication processes, such as surface anchoring and external fields, will be discussed. Finally, the review ends with a discussion of the supramolecular templates that have been made in this manner and used for the construction inorganic arrays, high performance opto-electronic materials, mesoporous templates and nanoparticle trapping.