Superatoms as Building Blocks of New Materials.

摘要

During the last couple of decades or so, the subject of nanoscale science began expanding into a unique field of science that offered the prospect of tailoring the design of materials having chosen properties. Two potentially promising approaches were conceived, one involving a bottom up approach while the other a top down method. In both cases, approaching the desirable nanoscale size regime where the properties of matter began to display nonlinear scalable behavior in which each atom counts, the connection to the area of cluster science began to be realized. Four well established academic groups (Castleman-PSU; Khanna---VCU; Sen---PSU; Weiss---PSU) successfully responded to a call for a MURI proposal with the eventual objective of expanding the concept of employing clusters and related superatoms for the use of building blocks for designing matter of nanoscale dimensions with tailored properties. The four groups, which had a history of closely interacting, fashioned a comprehensive research program to lay out the fundamentals for exploring the bottom up approach to design and produce new building blocks for several classes of systems including metals and alloys, metal compounds, metalloids, zintl ions and covalently bound species. Beyond the above, a major objective was to lay the foundation for producing materials with selected band gaps.