Nano structure materialNanostructured materials may be defined as those materials whose structural elements—
clusters, crystallites or molecules—have dimensions in the 1 to 100 nm range. The explosion
in both academic and industrial interest in these materials over the past decade arises from
the remarkable variations in fundamental electrical, optical and magnetic properties that occur
as one progresses from an ‘infinitely extended’ solid to a particle of material consisting of
a countable number of atoms. This review details recent advances in the synthesis and
investigation of functional nanostructured materials, focusing on the novel size-dependent
physics and chemistry that resultswhen electrons are confinedwithin nanoscale semiconductor
and metal clusters and colloids. Carbon-based nanomaterials and nanostructures including
fullerenes and nanotubes play an increasingly pervasive role in nanoscale science and
technology and are thus described in some depth.