KEF/BFZN Physical Principles of Nanotechnology

Lecturer: Jiří Tuček
Lecture: 25 hours/semester
Credits: 3
Winter semester
Form of course completion: exam

• Crystal structure of solids and their changes upon decrease in size of the (nano)material.
• FCC nanoparticles (structural magic numbers), tetrahedrally-coupled semiconducting structures (ionic model, covalent model, Vegard law).
• Schrödinger equation for a system of electrons and nuclei and its approximations, Bloch theorem, Bloch function, localized and delocalized electrons, localization of electrons with decrease in size of a (nano)material, hole (a quasi-particle with positive charge a positive effective mass), excitons (Mott-Wannier excitons and Frenkel excitons, Saha equation).
• Properties of individual nanoparticles, metal nanoclusters (preparation methods, structural and electronic magic numbers, superatoms, hellium model, basics of molecular orbital theory and density functional theory (DFT)).
• Semiconducting nanoclusters (optical properties of semiconducting nanoclusters and their change with size, regime of strong and weak confinement of the exciton, blue shift and size of semiconducting nanoclusters, change in the bandgap with the size of semiconducting clusters), photofragmentation, Coulomb explosion.
• Clusters of inert gases (van der Waals potential, Lennard-Jones potential), non-viscous nanoclusters, Bose-Einstein condensation (qualitative description), molecular nanoclusters (molecule of water and symmetrically hydrogen-bonded water).
• Bulk nanostructural disorder materials, mechanisms of defects evolution in grain materials, mechanical properties of disordered nanostructures (Young modulus, Hall-Petch equation, elasticity, brittleness and hardness of disordered nanostructures), nanostructural multilayered disordered materials (effect of thickness of nanolayers on hardness of the material), electrical properties of disordered nanostructural materials (conductivity and electron tunneling), nanocomposite metal nanoclusters containing glasses (optical properties and Plasmon absorption, non-linear optical phenomena – non-linear refractive index, methods of nanocomposite glasses preparation), porous silicon (luminescence, photoluminescence and phosphorescence, Jablonski diagram – qualitative description, emitting and non-emitting transitions, pore size and its effect on luminescence of silicon).
• Nanostructural crystals: natural nanocrystals, array of nanoparticles in zeolites, lattices of nanoparticles in colloidal suspensions (principle of hard and soft repulsion, Kirkwood-Alder transition, transition between FCC and BCC ordering), photonic crystals (definition and production of photonic crystals, Maxwell equations of the photonic crystals in operator form, Helmholtz equation for magnetic and electric intensity, periodicity of relative permittivity, bands of allowed and forbidden energies, dielectric and air bands, calculation of dispersion relation for simple 1D photonic crystal, resonant chamber, frequency and size of radius of holes in 2D and 3D photonic crystal).
• Quantum nature of the nanoworld (wave function, Schrodinger equation in one dimension, time dependent and independent Schrodinger equation, particle trapped in one dimension, linear combination of solution, expected values and two-particle wave function, reflection and tunneling through potential step, tunneling through potential barrier, particles trapped in two and three dimensions, quantum dots, two-dimensional bands and quantum wires, simple harmonic oscillator, magnetic moments).
• Quantum consequences for the macroworld, nanosymmetry and two-atomic molecules, covalent bond and covalent antibond as pure nanophysical phenomenon, definition of exchange interaction, polar and van der Waals fluctuation forces, electric polarization of neutral atoms and molecules, dipole-dipole interactions of neutral and symmetric atoms, Casimir force, experimental setup for measurement of Casimir force, hydrogen bond.
• Single-electron tunneling, Coulomb blocade, Coulomb staircase, superconductivity and quantum nanostructures