Structural Chemistry of Metal Microclusters: Questions and Answers

摘要

Metal microclusters are possibly the oldest nanopar-ticles that have been studied in the nanoworld. Many general properties of nanoparticles have long been thoroughly investigated using these microclusters as an example. The word "cluster" was used for the first time in 1661 by the English chemist R. Boyle in his book Sceptical Chemist. In the fourteenth century, an unknown author noted in the treatise Alchemy that one of the main technological methods of searching for the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life is "division, division, and division" and that, for this purpose, it is necessary to operate with smallest particles of matter. Undeniably, this operation "from top to bottom" had been known earlier and used in practice over many thousands of years. By the 1990s, a great number of works on the theory and practice dealing with metal microclusters, including the description of the structure and properties of these nanoparticles, had been accumulated in the scientific literature. In 1989, M. Duncan and D. Rouvray in their article "Microclusters," which was published in the journal Scientific American [1], used for the first time the phrase "the microcluster is a new phase of matter."