Antonietti M. (ed.) Colloid Chemistry I

Springer, 2003. — 262 p.It is the aim of the present issue of Topics in Current Chemistryto highlight some of the most attractive recent developments in colloid chemistry which are expected to have broader relevance and to be interesting to a more general readership. The contributions focus both on tools and procedures as well as on potential applications.
In this first volume, Stephan Förster opens with a quite general introduction which exemplifies the thinking in the field: how to bridge the nanogap between the largest structures organic chemistry can offer and the smallest structures engineering can provide by encoding the self-assembly within the structure of the primary element. Förster is an expert in employing amphiphilic block copolymers as tectonic units, and the prospects dealt with indeed span from advanced catalysis to biomedical applications.
Similar looking block-copolymers but also other self-organising templates are used by Christine Göltner-Spickermann for her nanocasting, i.e. the replication of complex soft-matter structures into inorganic and metallic frameworks.
The resulting porous materials are, at all events, inverted hard-copiesof the primary structure with exciting potential applications for basic physical chemistry (experiments under confined conditions), catalysis and chromatographic separation.
The aspect of rationally designed catalysts on the basis of active metallic nanoparticles supported by polymeric and nanoporous inorganic systems is elaborated in the contribution by Lyudmila Bronstein.Here, colloid chemistry is used to generate local environments which make a nanoparticle under reaction more durable or the reaction more specific. The extension of nanocasting to extended membrane-like and gel-like supports via nanocoatingis presented in the contribution by Rachel Caruso.Here, the organic template is reflected in a 3D connectivity of oxidic, crystalline nanoparticles, a technique which has the potential to revolutionize the way to construct photocatalysts, solar cells, and nanostructured catalytic supports in general.
Another way to organise inorganic particulate matter is delineated in the contribution of Jean Christophe Gabriel. Here, the classical self-organization principle of lyotropic liquid crystals is extended to inorganic colloids with a distinct shape and mutual interactions. Such organised arrays with high order are more durable and carry a potential inorganic functionality (electronic and magnetic properties) which can stimulate fresh ideas in nanotechnology.
Philippe Poulin uses liquid crystals in an unconventional fashion to generate highly organized arrays of droplets by demixing where defects control ripening and further growth. Besides providing beauty, this might give rise to a number of new matrix-assisted structuring processes, as also used indirectly in the contribution by Eric Kaler. Here, organised high-concentration surfactant phases are used as templates for organic polymerisation reactions and the Poulinmechanism is nicely trapped by the polymer structures produced which are not copies of the original template (as in case of nanocasting), but nanostructures organised by the controlled demixing process.
This volume is closed by a contribution by Paul Mulvaney and Luis Liz-Marzán who used the nanocoating of Au-nanoparticles as a first step in the rational design of nanohybrids with very special optical and photonic properties.
The ability to hybridise metals and inorganic oxides on the colloidal scale while there is no direct bond on a molecular level nicely underlines the potential of modern colloid chemistry to employ and merge very different building blocks on the mesoscale and to realise hybrid situations and high performance systems which are otherwise not accessible.