How many atoms make a metal?

COMP Seminar -- Speaker: Hannu Häkkinen, Scientific Director, Nanoscience Center, University of Jyväskylä

A major challenge in nanoscience concerns understanding the behavior of systems when their size increases from a few atoms towards bulk. The properties of small molecules and bulk matter are well understood, while nanoclusters and small particles need to be studied much more to uncover their size-dependent properties. Nanometer-scale, ligand-stabilized noble metal clusters have emerged in recent years as a novel form of nanoscale matter with potential applications in molecular electronics, optics, sensing, drug delivery and biolabeling. Tremendous advances have been achieved in discovering their structures due to contributions from synthetic work, X-ray crystallography and density functional theory computations. This talk discusses recent progress in understanding the development of their “metallicity” as a function of the increasing size.