Symposium H: 3-D Nanoengineered Assemblies

Abstract : The 3D Nanoengineered Assemblies symposium brought together researchers from a wide range of fields. 3D Nanoengineered Assemblies included much work that was "not quite truly 3D" and "not quite on the nanoscale." The result was a meeting in which common overarching themes emerged from presentations in widely separated research areas. More than 100 abstracts were submitted, and there were 29 invited talks covering work that spanned a remarkable number of topics. One of the most interesting aspects of nanotechnology is the ability to access physical phenomena that occur on the nanoscale. A compelling example of this sort of nanoscale phenomena exploits the collective electronic excitations (plasma oscillations or plasmons) in metal nanoparticles to manipulate energy and matter. Lithographic methods can be either masked based or maskless. Much of the time devoted to modern materials processing has been spent developing mask based lithographic techniques and as a consequence they are quite mature. Some of the speakers presented work that used conventional methods at high resolution to great advantage. The maskless direct write processing community was well represented by electron and particle beam talks. Non-lithographic techniques were also discussed in this meeting. This included a number of talks on self-assembly. Nanoparticle assemblies, Nanotubes, Nanowires and Nanosprings were the topics of a number of talks. Two of the aspects of the biological model for materials processing that make it most appealing are the directed self-assembly and the bottom-up approach to processing. Together, these aspects of biological control of materials have become a prototype for an elegant approach to processing.