Cover Picture: Surfactant‐Mediated Generation of Iso‐Oriented Dense and Mesoporous Crystalline Metal‐Oxide Layers (Adv. Mater. 14/2006)

Abstract For certain metal oxides (e.g., MoO₃) ordered mesoporous films can be obtained with the nanocrystals in the pore walls being uniformly oriented with respect to the substrate by applying evaporation‐induced self‐assembly followed by heating. This surprisingly facile process, described by Smarsly and co‐workers on p. 1827, works on different polar substrates (glass, metals, etc.) for oxides with anisotropic unit cells, based on the interaction with surfactants during nucleation (“soft‐epitaxy”).