In contrast to conventional lithography techniques which will soon hit their limits in terms of feature size and fabrication cost, recent years have seen considerable progress in the development of self-assembling nano-structured surfaces. In the work reported here, surface structures on the submicron scale have been created from polymer, copolymer, nanoparticle, and dendrimer building blocks by employing phenomena such as self-assembly, self-organization and non-equilibrium processes. This low-cost approach is expected to result in a new generation of surfaces with novel physical and chemical properties.
