Physical Supramolecular Chemistry

From its beginnings in the organic chemistry laboratories of the 1960s and 70s, supramolecular chemistry has become a mature discipline, producing compounds and assemblies with interesting and useful physical properties. The field is now ripe for the direct input of the physical chemists, who are capable of generating new methods or modifying old ones, making the necessary measurements to establish the structural and functional characteristics of the materials being synthesised. The size of supramolecular assemblies has grown exponentially in recent years, so standard techniques cannot be used to characterise them. New ones, many of them drawn from biophysical laboratories, are being applied, offering detailed structural information and new ways to construct novel architectures on surfaces. §The time is therefore ripe for the publication of Physical Supramolecular Chemistry, in which the emphasis is not on the synthetic, but on the physical characterisation of structures, dealing with the new challenges imposed by their growing complexity. Furthermore, while many problems can be solved synthetically, the right physical measuring technique may preclude the need for much tedious and laborious synthetic work. It is this physical approach, as a way of doing supramolecular chemistry, that is so superbly illustrated in the present book.