Nanoscale Materials with Programmable and Reconfigurable States

The diverse emerging nanotechnological applications, from photonics to biomaterials and from computing to sensing, require the integration of functional nanocomponents into complex engineered architectures. While top-down fabrication methods are limited in creating 3D nanostructures, self-assembly typically does not provide flexibility and designability for creating targeted architectures. The talk will discuss our advances in DNA-programmable self-assembly for realizing designed finite-size and large-scale nano-architectures from diverse inorganic and biomolecular nanocomponents with a pre-defined organization at different scales in 2D and 3D. We developed a bottom-up fabrication strategy for programming and assembly of designed periodic and hierarchical organizations and established guiding principles to enhance their fidelity based on information-efficient encoding. The advances in creating reconfigurable systems with defined structural states and coupling reconfiguration processes at different scales will be demonstrated. The development of advanced characterization methods for revealing the 3D organization of nanoscale materials will also be discussed in the context of the presented self-assembly by-design approaches.