2. Creating nanostructures

There is therefore a pressing demand to create and manipulate conductive nano-objects, for example, placing them between two electrodes, aligning them parallel to each other and, in this way, creating complex circuitry on a submicron scale. If these objects are constructed from assembled molecules, we speak of "supramolecular electronics".

One way of creating these devices is to force molecules to self-assemble in preferred directions or in pre-defined regions. It is above all the nature of the substrate surface or its structuring (natural or imposed) that will guide this preferential self-assembly. The various strategies proposed by researchers for organizing matter on a surface are based on the presence of :

• domains with different physico-chemical characteristics on a local scale (a few micrometers or tens of nanometers);...