Self-Organized Smoothing

It should be noted that the methods reviewed below can be applied not only to a planar substrate but also to convex and concave substrates. They can also be applied to an inner wall surface of a cylinder if it can be illuminated by propagating light. Furthermore, they can be used for a variety of materials, such as glasses, erystals, ceramics, metals, plastics, and so on. Since a high optical power is not required, visible LEDs can be employed as low-power-consumption light sources. 

Surface roughness can be repaired by two methods, which are reviewed in this 

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Abstract The self-organized and molecularly smooth surface on liquid microdroplets makes them attractive as optical cavities with very high quality factors. This chapter describes the basic theory of optical modes in spherical droplets. The mechanical properties including vibrational excitation are also described, and their implications for microdroplet resonator technology are discussed. Optofluidic implementations of microdroplet resonators are reviewed with emphasis on the basic optomechanical properties. 

From the above it is apparent that the distinction between self-assembly and self-organization is not always easy to make since the processes involved may be rather complex (for a review see [12]). However, the external control, which is exerted by a template and which may differ in relative strength, provides a clear distinction between template-controlled processes and self-ordering processes. A key factor on surfaces in this context will be the transition from adsorbate-adsorbate dominated interactions to substrate-adsorbate (template) dominated processes. This transition is displayed in Fig. 3. Apparently the transition is smooth so that template-assisted processes... 

Tadros ME, Hu P, Adamson AW (1974) Adsorption and contact angle studies. 1. Water and smooth carbon, linear polyethylene, and stearic add-coated copper. J CoU Interf, Sci 49 184-195 Tadros TE, (ed) (2011) Self-organized surfactant structures. Wiley-VCH Verlag, Germany, pp 270 Tarasevich Yul (2008) Energetics of the interaction of water and other liquids with bthe surface of hydrophilic and hydrophobic sorbents according to data on the heats of wetting. Theor Exptl Chem 44 1-23... 

Free 4.5 nm DND particles demonstrate very interesting properties. While drying the aqueous suspension on smooth surfaces, the particles reveal the tendency to self-organize and form fanciful thread-like and fishnet-like structures. According to the results of self-consistent calculations based on density functional theory (DFT), the reason for these phenomena is in presence of the electric fields caused by fhe nonuniformity of distribution of the electronic density across the opposite facets of free particles of DND due to their small size. ... 

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