Xia Xin

By Xia Xin , Guiying Xu and Hongguang Li

Part of the book: Physical and Chemical Properties of Carbon Nanotubes

By Jinglin Shen, Shiling Yuan and Xia Xin

The technique of ionic self‐assembly (ISA), on the basis of electrostatic interactions, is a powerful tool to create new material nanostructures and chemical objects due to its advantages of facility, reliability, cost saving, flexibility, and universality. It has attracted great attention because of its promising applications in catalysis, drug delivery, and molecular detection. This review focuses on recent advances in the construction of self‐assemblies with different morphologies on the basis of ISA strategy and its applications. The ISA method provides an opportunity to generate complex and hierarchical assemblies with tunable properties, which is regarded as a very promising case of supramolecular chemistry.

Part of the book: Molecular Self-assembly in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology

By Zhaohua Song, Yanzhao Yang and Xia Xin

Liquid crystals (LCs) are considered as the “fourth state of matter,” which can display properties between crystals and isotropic liquids. LCs can be classified into lyotropic liquid crystals (LLCs) and thermotropic liquid crystals (TLCs), among which LLCs are a kind of self-assemblies formed by amphiphile molecules in a given solvent within certain concentration ranges. The structures and properties of LLCs can be tuned by the incorporation of various kinds of additives, which represents an interesting and novel route for realizing functional composites. This review focuses on recent progress on LLCs-based materials assembled with diverse additives including carbon nanotubes, graphene, graphene oxide, and biomolecules. The thermal stability and mechanical strength of the host LLCs can be greatly improved after the guests are incorporated. In addition, new functions such as conductivity, photothermal effect, and bioactivity can be introduced by the incorporation of the guests, which significantly widens the applications of LLCs-based hybrids in nanotechnology, electrochemistry, drug delivery, and life science.

Part of the book: Liquid Crystals