Thermally driven self assembly

Thermally driven assembly is also called called self assembly or brownian assembly (seldom)
(TODO: Add minimal definition)

• Today thermally driven assembly is already extensively used (e.g. structural DNA nanotechnology) this will continue onward into the early stages of the development of atomically precise manufacturing (APM).

• In the early and the later stages of APM development: brownian mechanosynthesis could be an intermediate step to advanced APM systems.
• In the later and the final stages of APM development: self assisted assembly will come to intensive use.

Beside the actual function of the building block (structural element / machine element) completely unguided thermally driven assembly requires the building blocks to be have a unambiguous unique puzzle piece shape that completely determines its target position. (everything that can stick will stick)

• Brownian assembly is generally slower then advanced directed assembly like mechanosynthesis. (numbers needed)
• The ambient temperature dictates diffusion speed.
• Lower dimensionality that is diffusion on a surface instead of a volume or on a line instead of a surface speeds up the process.
• Dividing one long diffusion path to several shorter irreversible diffusion transport stretches speeds up the process.

Possible sub-classifications

• self-folding
• self-finding

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• iterative self-assembly
• one-pot self-assemby (necessarily requiring a larger size of an orthogonal set of interfaces)

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• self-assembly of floppy foldamer chains at the first selfassembly level
• self-assembly of stiff pre-self-assembled tiles at the second assembly level

(wiki-TODO: what are the overlaps and differences) (wiki-TODO: what are advantages and limitations)

Related

• Thermal motion
• Diffusion transport
• Thermally driven assembly is a powerful for bootstrapping in the incremental path towards advanced APM. It can help the introduction of total positional control
• In thermally driven assembly diffusion transport brings the parts to their final destination.
• In the process of self folding the parts are already connected (assembled) on a common flexible backbone but there is further thermally driven folding happening. This may be counted to thermally driven assembly but is often not.
• Brownian technology path

External links

• Video: macroscopic demonstration of self assembly driven by large scale vibrations

There's huge amount of literature on thermally driven assembly.

• Wikipedia: self assembly
• Wikipedia: molecular self assembly