Freely Accessible Internet Resources for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Education and Research at Portland State University's Research Servers

Abstract

ABSTRACTBecause a great deal of nanoscience and nanotechnology relies on crystalline nanometer sized or nanometer structured materials, crystallographers have to provide their specific contributions to the National Nanotechnology Initiative. Here we review two open access internet-based crystallographic databases, the Crystallography Open Database (COD) and the Nano-Crystallography Database (NCD), that store information in the Crystallographic Information File (CIF) format. Having more than ten thousand crystallographic data sets available on the internet in a standardized format allows for many kinds of internet-based crystallographic calculations and visualizations. Examples for this that are dealt with in this paper are interactive crystal structure visualizations in three dimensions (3D) and calculations of theoretical lattice-fringe fingerprint plots for the identification of unknown nanocrystals from their atomic-resolution transmission electron microscopy images.