Supramolecular Silver Polyoxometalate Architectures Direct the Growth of Composite Semiconducting Nanostructures

摘要

The controlled bottom-up assembly of nanostructured materials from molecular precursors has great promise if molecular synthetic control can be translated to the nanoscale. This is because the assembly of molecules in the low-nanometer domain (0.5-5 nm) is possible by bottom-up molecular self-assembly yet is not possible for top-down methods owing to the present limitations of lithography (ca. 10 nm). In our own work we have hypothesized that linkable polyoxometalates (POMs) (anionic transition-metal-oxide clusters) have great potential to direct nanomaterial growth, since POMs themselves are molecular, yet can approach 5 nm in size for the largest known cluster.