The Nanochemistry facility at IIT aims to advance the exploitation of nanostructures, fabricated by chemical approaches, as building blocks for engineered self assembly architectures across multiple length scales, from the molecular level up to the macroscopic world.

The person in charge of the facility is Dr. Liberato Manna. At present the facility comprises a Chemistry /Biology Lab for synthesis and functionalization of various nanomaterials and an Electron microscopy Lab. Both labs have been completed in April 2009 and we are now in a start-up phase (hiring of post docs and of technicians, acquisition of additional equipment such as an X-ray diffractometer and an XPS system, and starting of the research and support activities).

Our broad goal, apart from providing general chemical and electron microscopy support to the research activities of the various IIT departments, is to develop new strategies of nanostructure assembly able to create various types of nanoparticle architectures, to discover collective properties stemming from them, and to exploit such properties in a wide range of applications (for instance in energy-related applications and in medicine). The path to these architectures will exploit concepts that are amenable to large scale deposition and parallelization.

The advanced fabrication of colloidal inorganic nanocrystals of a variety of materials will be one of the basic targets. These will be then surface-functionalized and assembled into both ordered and disordered superstructures onto substrates and in association various polymers, for preparing nanostructured films and surfaces, nanocomposites and nanocapsules.

More details on the various research activities can be found in the "Labs" section.