Tenth Sir Nevill Mott Lecture

A Glimpse into Sub-Nanostructures

Professor Arndt Simon

(Max Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung Stuttgart, Germany)

Wednesday 5 May 2004

Hosted by Department of Physics, Loughborough University

For many years the term "Microstructure Research" addressed research at the cutting edge, in our days being replaced by the term "Nanostructures Research". It is time to think about the next step, which is the step into sub-nanostructures. This area could be entered top-down; however, the bottom-up direction seems more feasible. The necessary term has been coined already — supramolecular chemistry — which carries the interest of chemists from molecular structures to assemblies of molecules and their properties.

Quasi-molecular metal clusters provide versatile units in a subnano-scale construction kit. Depending on the nature of the atoms, these clusters may consist of a core of metal atoms surrounded by non-metal atoms, and their arrangement in a solid results in a regular “dispersion” of little pieces of metal in a dielectric matrix. At the other extreme are clusters which accumulate negatively charged non-metal atoms inside beneath a metallic skin. They condense into a solid which represents a “dispersion” of little pieces of salt in a metal. Such structures relate to quantum dot and antiquantum dot arrays, but two orders of magnitude smaller than those produced by current artificial structuring.

The Sir Nevill Mott lecture series at Loughborough was inaugurated by Sir Nevill Mott in 1995. Previous lectures

For further information contact

Dr Klaus Neumann
(01509) 223310
Department of Physics
Loughborough University
Loughborough, Leics LE11 3TU