The interest in functional supramolecular systems for the design of innovative materials and technologies, able to fundamentally change the world, is growing at a high pace. The huge array of publications that appeared in recent years in the global literature calls for systematization of the structural trends inherent in the formation of these systems revealed at different molecular platforms and practically useful properties they exhibit. The attention is concentrated on the topics related to functional supramolecular systems that are actively explored in institutes and universities of Russia in the last 10–15 years, such as the chemistry of host–guest complexes, crystal engineering, self-assembly and self-organization in solutions and at interfaces, biomimetics and molecular machines and devices.The bibliography includes 1714 references.

In this work, a previously undescribed phenomenon of orientation-induced redox isomerism in a Langmuir monolayer is revealed in the case of cerium bis-[tetra-(15-crown-5)-phthalocyaninate]-(Ce[(15C5)₄Pc]₂). It was established that intramolecular electron transfer (IET) from the electronic system of phthalocyanine to the 4f-orbital of cerium atom occurs upon spreading of a (Ce[(15C5)₄Pc]₂) chloroform solution onto the air–water interface (3D → 2D IET). This process is related to the transformation of Ce⁴⁺ cation in the solution to Ce³⁺ in the monolayer. It was also found that reversible Ce³⁺ ↔ Ce⁴⁺ IETs occur upon compression (π₁ → π₂) and expansion (π₂ → π₁) of monolayer (2D^π1 ↔ 2D^π2 IET, π-surface pressure). The mechanism of genuine redox isomerism was confirmed by the results of in situ UV–vis spectral measurements performed on monolayers and Langmuir–Blodgett films, AFM, and XPS studies of Langmuir–Blodgett films transferred at different surface pressures. The understanding of this reversible IET mechanism is especially important due to possible applications of such redox-isomeric systems in the development of nanoscale multibit information storage devices.

This paper analyzes the prospects of studying optically anisotropic monolayers on a liquid substrate using linearly polarized light. For quantification of the electronic transmission spectra of the...