Abstract

Chemists have made tremendous advances in synthesizing a variety of nanostructures with control over their size, shape, and chemical composition. This suggests an opportunity to use nanostructures as building blocks to fabricate macroscopic materials with controlled and potentially even new behaviours. This talk will present a variety of remarkable electronic behaviours that nanostructured materials – fashioned from even simple building blocks such as metal nanoparticles and molecular linkers – can exhibit, such as single electron effects, metal-insulator transitions, and strong electron-electron interactions (correlated electronic behaviour). The latter is particularly exciting since strongly correlated electrons are known to lie at the heart of some of the most exotic behaviours in condensed matter science (e.g. high Tc superconductivity in the cuprates and other materials). The talk will survey new insights and new opportunities that arise for exploring electronic behaviour using this nano building block approach.