Phys.org April 22, 2022
An international team of researchers (USA – Cornell University, Rochester Institute of Technology, Canada) has created synthetic nanoclusters from an organic–inorganic mesophase composed of monodisperse Cd37S18 magic-size cluster building blocks. The process produced “magic-size clusters” of 57 atoms, about 1.5 nanometers in length. Each of these nanoparticles had a shell of ligands that could interact with each other in such a way that they formed filaments several microns long and hundreds of nanometers wide. The filaments were periodically decorated with the magic-size clusters with perfect spacing between them. Enhanced patterning was achieved by controlling processing conditions, resulting in bullseye and ‘zigzag’ stacking patterns with periodicity in two directions. The resulting synthetic thin films have the potential to serve as a model system for exploring biomimetic hierarchical systems and future advanced functions from sensing, catalysis, and circular polarized light-detectors to further-out prospects in spintronics, quantum computing and holography…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Method and mechanism for patterning of aligned films using different geometric confinements. Credit: Nature Materials (2022)Â