Material growth process systems

In recent years much effort has been spent on the development of experimental techniques to grow well defined nanoscale materials, due to their possible applications in nanometric electronic devices. Indeed the creation of nanowire field effect transistors [128-132], nano-sensors [133,134], atomic scale light emitting diodes and lasers [135,136], has been made possible by the development of new techniques, which allow one to control the growth processes of nanotubes, nanowires and quantum dots. Of particular importance, among the different atomic scale systems experimentally studied, are... 

Addition polymerization is usually such a rapid process that only monomer and final polymer chains are present. Very little of the active material in the system is oligomeric, that is, consisting of only a small number of linked monomer units en route to polymer, at any one point in time. Also, in addition polymerization the whole monomer molecule adds to form polymer. No small molecule is lost in the process. Further details of the polymerization processes involved and the structural properties of the products obtained from addition polymerization are discussed in Chaps. 22 and 23. This chapter will focus on the background theory of synthetic polymers, and condensation, or step-growth, polymerization. 

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