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This report explores the opportunity and defines the research agenda for mesoscale science—discovering, understanding, and controlling interactions among disparate systems and phenomena to reach the full potential of materials complexity and functionality. The ability to predict and control mesoscale phenomena and architectures is essential if atomic and molecular knowledge is to blossom into a next generation of technology opportunities, societal benefits, and scientific advances.. The body of this report outlines the need, the opportunities, the challenges, and the benefits of mastering mesoscale science.
Described herein are nanoreactors having various shapes that can be produced by a simple chemical process. The nanoreactors described herein may have a shell as thin as 0.5 nm and outside diameters that can be controlled by the process of making and have a nanoparticle enclosed therein. The nanoreactors have catalytic activity and may be used to catalyze a variety of chemical reactions.
By monitoring the polarized light scattering from individual gold nanorods in a darkfield microscope, we are able to determine their orientation as a function of time. We demonstrate time resolution of milliseconds and observation times of hours by observing the two-dimensional rotational diffusion of gold rods attached to a glass surface. The observed orientational diffusion shows a fast component of about 60 ms and "sticky times" of seconds. The large signal-to-noise ratio, chemical and photochemical stability, fast time response, and small size of these gold nanorods make them an ideal probe for orientation sensing in material science and molecular biology.
Structural transformations in CdSe nanocrystals are studied using high pressure x-ray diffraction and high pressure optical absorption at room temperature. The nanocrystals undergo a wurtzite to rock salt transition analogous to that observed in bulk CdSe. Both the thermodynamics and the kinetics of the transformation, however, are significantly different in finite size. The nanocrystal phase transition pressures vary from 3.6 to 4.9 GPa for crystallites ranging from 21 to 10 Å in radius, respectively, in comparison to a value of 2.0 GPa for bulk CdSe. The size dependent data can be modeled using thermodynamics when surface energies are accounted for. Surface energies calculated in this way can be used to understand the dynamic microscopic path followed by atoms during the phase transition. X-ray diffraction data also shows that unlike bulk CdSe, crystalline domain size is conserved upon multiple transition in the nanocrystals, indicating that the transition only nucleates once in each nanocrystal.
