Related papers: Silicon nanostructures toxicity. An ab inito appro…
Silicon-based micro and nanoparticles have gained popularity in a wide range of biomedical applications due to their biocompatibility and biodegradability in-vivo, as well as a flexible surface chemistry, which allows drug loading,…
Nanometre- to micrometre-sized solid dust particles play a vital role in star and planet formations. Despite of their importance, however, our understanding of physical and chemical properties of dust particles is still provisional. We have…
Silicon offers great promise as a potential anode active material and the optimum alternative to lithium metal in all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries. However, its practical application is limited by severe volume expansion (~300%) during…
Networks of silicon nanowires possess intriguing electronic properties surpassing the predictions based on quantum confinement of individual nanowires. Employing large-scale atomistic pseudopotential computations, as yet unexplored branched…
All electronic, optoelectronic or photovoltaic applications of silicon depend on controlling majority charge carriers via doping with impurity atoms. Nanoscale silicon is omnipresent in fundamental research (quantum dots, nanowires) but…
Topological surface states, a new kind of electronic state of matter, have recently been observed on the cleaved surfaces of crystals of a handful of small band gap semiconductors. The underlying chemical factors that enable these states…
A brief review is given of recent positron studies of metal and semiconductor nanocrystals. The prospects offered by positron annihilation as a sensitive method to access nanocrystal (NC) properties are described and compared with other…
In this paper, we study nanoparticles with constituent atoms ranging from dozens to hundreds of them. These types of particles display structural and magnetic properties that strongly depend on the number of constituents N. The metal…
Hollow cylinders with a diameter in the nanometer range are carving out prime positions in nanoscience. Thanks to their physico-chemical properties, they could be key elements for next-generation nanofluidics devices, for selective…
In this review, we present our recent computational work on carbon-based nanostructured composites. These materials consist of carbon crystallites embedded in an amorphous carbon matrix and are modeled here through classical and…
We show that the optical and electronic properties of nanocrystalline silicon can be efficiently tuned using impurity doping. In particular, we give evidence, by means of ab-initio calculations, that by properly controlling the doping with…
We theoretically study the electronic structure and spin properties of one-dimensional nanostructures of the prototypical bulk topological insulator Bi$_2$Se$_3$. Realistic models of experimentally observed Bi$_2$Se$_3$ nanowires and…
The development of nanoscale solid-state devices exploiting the promising topological surface states of topological insulator materials requires careful device engineering and improved materials quality. For instance, the introduction of a…
Optically-levitated dielectric particles can serve as ultra-sensitive detectors of feeble forces and torques, as tools for use in quantum information science, and as a testbed for quantum coherence in macroscopic systems. Knowledge of the…
Nanoscale biosystems are widely used in numerous medical applications. The approaches for structure and function of the nanomachines that are available in the cell (natural nanomachines) are discussed. Molecular simulation studies have been…
Silicon nanowires grown along the <100>-direction with a bulk Si core are studied with density functional calculations. Two surface reconstructions prevail after exploration of a large fraction of the phase space of nanowire…
Unusual physical properties of single-wall carbon nanotubes have started a search for similar tubular structures of other elements. In this paper, we present a theoretical analysis of single-wall nanotubes of silicon and group III-V…
The relevant length scales for superconductivity are of the order of nanometers. By confining the superconducting condensate to such dimensions, many physical properties change substantially, and novel phenomena emerge, which are absent in…
Throughout the evolution of biological species on Earth, cells and organs have developed many complex structures and processes to ensure their interactions with individual chemical molecules (small and macromolecular) and nanoscale objects…
Studying the crystallization process of silicon is a challenging task since empirical potentials are not able to reproduce well the properties of both semiconducting solid and metallic liquid. On the other hand, nucleation is a rare event…