Nanoparticles and nanostructured materials for energy applications
Abstract
Nanoparticles can be thought as tailorable building blocks for fabricating new materials with on-demand, tunable properties–for example by assembling them in a controlled way. The final properties of the material will depend on the mesoscale architecture of the assembly as well as on the characteristics of the nanoparticles. I will review existing approaches and some of our laboratory's efforts for designing and realizing engineered nanoparticle architectures ("engineering nanoparticles"), as well as for utilizing them to fabricate new materials for applications in photovoltaics and biomedical-related fields ("engineering 'with' nanoparticles").