Chemists always dealt with matter at the nanometer scale, but technological progresses in small scale characterization, and improvements in synthesis processes allow them now to design and create synthetic materials with designated dimensions, shapes, ordering and functions. NanoChemistry relies on bottom-up strategies to design muliscale materials with hierarchical, ordered and textures strucures.

"There’s plenty of room at the bottom" as said Richard Feynman back in 1959, meaning that the future of science was to be found in nanometer scale. Yet, chemists were already tilling that soil from centuries designing and creating materials from atomic and molecular bricks. They are now able to follow directly the processes wiche govern the growth and the ordering at molecular scale.
It is thus possible to probe the properties of materials at the "mesoscale", i.e. between bulk matter and isolated objects, where many unexpected effects show up.
Hence nanochemistry aims at synthsizing multiscale materials with hierarchical, ordered and textured structures from molecular sources or nanomater-size aggregates following a bottom-up approach.
 Nanoparticles, nanotubes, nanowires are thus the brick and mortar of foams without any surfactant, of transparent and conducting organic membranes, of their synthesis, their shape, their surface chemistry and their self-ordering.
The chemistry teams from C’Nano IdF are targeting various aplications, from medical diagnosis to electronics, fromnew energy solutions to environmental issues. They also develop novel characterization methods to probe the structure, the composition and the reactivity of nanoobjects and nanomaterials at the nanoscale.