Tether assisted assembly

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Tether aided assembly is the weakest possible form of mechanosynthesis.
It involves only crude positional guiding to the target (placement) area.
Leaving the part to be placed lots of wiggle-room by holding and guiding it via a tether (flexible chain molecule).

Positional guidance with "snapping to target"

For reliable reactions there needs to be "snap to target".
That is: An energy energy neds to be dissipated that is >>kT.

Positional assembly atop highly localized (thermally driven) selfassembly

Optionally "last mile self assembly" may still be involved.
That is: Picking out the right reaction site by shape complementarity, but highly localized around the target site.
Encoding of position can be more compact as a smaller address space needs to be covered.

In case of "last mile self assembly" its callable a semi-mechanosynthetic process.
But better stick to "tether aided (local) selfassembly".

Misc

It seems tether aided assembly is more suitable for assembly than for disassembly or site-specific workpiece activation.

Related

• Method of assembly => Thermally driven self assembly
• Mechanosynthesis (disambiguation) => Mechanosynthesis
• Introduction of total positional control

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• Technology level 0, Technology level I
• Modular molecular composite nanosystems

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• Effective concentration
• Incremental path