The purpose of the course is to give a survey of the many techniques of physical synthesis and analysis of nanoparticles (NPs).
The course is structured as follows:
- Introduction to the nanoparticles and their applications. Definition of nanoparticles. Importance of nanoparticles in nanotechnology. Definition of bottom-up and top-down synthesis. Application of NPs in medicine and diagnostics, catalysis and photovoltaic.
- Properties of Nanoparticles. Morphology and structure properties. Shell structure and magic numbers. Multitwinning. Electronic structure. Quantum size effects. Optical properties. Mie’s theory of optical absorption of nanoparticles. Surface plasmoni resonances. Magnetic properties. Superparamagnetism.
- Physical synthesis of nanoparticles. Ball-milling. Gas aggregation. Seeded supersonic beam. Laser evaporation. Pulsed arc, pulsed microplasma. Evaporation on substrate and self aggregation.
- Analysis of nanoparticles. Mass spectroscopy and filtering. Electron microscopy: TEM, STEM, SEM. AFM. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. Optical reflectivity. Magnetometry: SQUID, VSM, AGFM. In-flight analysis: electron diffraction, photoelectron spectroscopy, magnetic beam deflection.
- Experiments on nanoparticles. Examples of experiments on selected assemblies of nanoparticles. This part will be followed by a video tutorial in a laboratory.