Nanostructured Materials

Nanostructure science is a broad area of research has the potential for revolutionizing the ways in which materials and products are created. Nanostructured materials may be defined as those materials whose structural elements, clusters, crystallelites and molecules have dimensions in the 1 to 100nm range. Over the last two decades the development and improvement of techniques to fabricate and characterize nanoscale materials has fueled much of the enormous growth in nanoscale science and technology, not only making nanoscale materials relatively easily available for scientific study and characterization but also in some instances, opening the door for large-scale industrial use. This book details recent advances in the synthesis and investigation of functional materials, focusing on the novel size dependent physics and chemistry that results when atoms and electrons are confined within nanoscale semiconductors and metal clusters. Nanostructure science and technology is a broad and interdisciplinary area of research and development activity that has been growing explosively worldwide in the past few years. It has the potential for revolutionizing the ways in which materials and products are created and the range and nature of functionalities that can be accessed. It is already having a significant commercial impact, which surely will increase in the future and this has been discussed at length in this volume.