Amphiphiles-metals interactions for applications in modern technologies: Recent developments and future perspectives

Amphiphiles play a pivotal role in the area of self-assembled structures and interesting additional features can be obtained if metal ions are involved. In this ambit, the development of smart materials benefits from the availability of stimuli-responsive supramolecular amphiphile assemblies where the disassembly back-processes has an inherently basic role providing reversible switching particularly useful in novel approaches and applications. In this tutorial review the basic concepts on self-assembly of traditional and novel amphiphilic molecules with metals are summarized and the more recent concepts of supramolecular assembly are presented. The aim of this contribution is to furnish to the reader a panoramic view of this exciting problematic clarifying what is meant with the concept of complexity and how the rich world of amphiphilic molecules is employed with metals for obtaining complex nanostructure-based systems with novel characteristics for applications in nanotechnology.