Supramolecular Chemistry at Interfaces: Molecular Recognition on Nanopatterned Porous Surfaces

AbstractThrough the illustration of key examples that have recently appeared in the literature, the intention of this review is to provide a perspective of current advances on the molecular recognition at the interfaces aimed at the engineering of multifunctional organic‐based materials. The great interest in such systems has been motivated by the need to fabricate smaller and smaller components in order to improve, for example, the information storage capabilities of classical silicon‐based devices. Although great progress has been achieved on the exploitation of “top‐down” approaches, strong hope is now put on the development of hybrid devices in which the elementary components are replaced with single organic molecules. Nevertheless, the drive towards such devices is restricted by both their stability and difficulties to precisely control and manipulate the structural organisation at the molecular level. To overcome these restrictions, the use of nanotemplated surfaces featuring porous domains in which responsive functional molecules can be precisely accommodated at the single‐molecule level is one of the most promising approaches. In the first part of this manuscript, we theref