A Periodic Table in Three Dimensions: A Sightseeing Tour in the Nanometer World

Abstract

Abstract Access to techniques to produce and characterize free clusters built up from two to thousands of atoms has during the last decades generated several exciting discoveries and established cluster science as a research field of its own. This field is highly interdisciplinary, and knowledge from different areas of physics and chemistry has been of considerable importance for this rapid development. One of the objectives is to gain an understanding of the material growth i. e. how many atoms are needed in a cluster to make its physical or chemical properties similar to what is known for the corresponding solid. Studies of various properties for some clusters have, however, revealed large fluctuations and periodicities which can be interpreted either as geometric or electronic shell closings, with the appearance of so-called magic numbers. This kind of periodicity is quite different from what is known from the periodic table in atomic physics but has some similarities with the magic numbers in nuclear physics. In addition to clusters characterized by shell structure, also very unique clusters exist such as the fullerenes, in particular Buckminsterfullerene or Ceo discovered in 1985, which was a new form of carbon different from the earlier known forms of graphite and diamond. The field of fullerenes has, especially, after the invention of a method for production of macroscopic amounts in 1990, developed in an extremely exciting way with several serendipitous advances including fabrication of crystals, films and new materials with unique properties such as the nanotubes, carbon onions and met cars. Many of these discoveries have opened up new areas of modern mesoscopic physics and materials science. Particularly interesting is how some data available for clusters and fullerenes show periodicities which might be classified in “A Periodic Table in Three Dimensions”.