Nanostructured Materials
Nanostructured Materials
Most of naturally occurring nanostructured materials are hierarchically organized, with an organization of materials in discrete steps, ranging from the atomic to the macroscopic scale. It is possible in principle to take as model what occurs in nature to design novel materials for a wide range of application. Mission of the Project is the design, the preparation and the study of hierarchically organized systems starting from both inorganic and bio-organic building blocks to obtain structure more and more complex and functional materials on unconventional surfaces in order to bridge the gap between nanosize regime and mesoscopical scale, providing nanostructured material properly addressable to target application. In this perspective an extensive characterization of the structures at the different levels of assembling is fundamental in order to elucidate the evolution of the properties starting from the original building blocks towards the three-dimensional organized system.
The scientific interests of CNR IPCF SS Bari in soft matter cover different research areas:
Living soft matter: isolation, reconstitution and chemical-physics investigation of biomaterials involved in biological energy transduction and molecular recognition at increasing complexity level, from molecules to membrane enzymes and cells;
Material science: nanostructured materials, ranging from the development of methods to synthesize nanoparticles of semiconductors and oxides, to the assembling of obtained nanocrystals in organized structures, their incorporation in host polymer and their characterization from spectroscopical, structural, morphological and photo-electrochemical points of view;
Interfaces and hybrid systems of photochemical interest based both on colloidal nanocrystals organized in 2/3 dimensions and the biological molecular machinery to develop a new generation of complex materials, with unique original characteristics. The ultimate goal is control and modulate, through the control of composition, geometry, chemical functionalization, nature and degree structural organization of the single entities, both (bio)organic and inorganic.