Super-Abundant Size-Selected Cluster Technology for Nanoscale Design of Functional Materials

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Size-selected clusters are collections of atoms, from 2 to ~20,000, with diameters between a few Angstroms and ~20nm. The remarkable physical and chemical properties of clusters depend on the number of atoms they contain and differ dramatically from the corresponding individual atoms and bulk solids. They have numerous potential applications, as catalytic particles, as components of novel electronic and photonic materials and sensors, as binding sites for protein molecules in biochips, as environmental reference materials, etc etc. The best current cluster beam sources are limited to the production of ~1microgram of clusters per day. I propose a method to increase that rate by 10 orders of magnitude, transforming the field. The enormous increase in the availability of size-selected clusters produced by the "Matrix-Assembly Cluster Source" (MACS) is expected to open up completely new horizons across a wide range of disciplines - from physics and chemistry to biology and engineering - and applications, creating significant opportunities for radical advances in both basic science and advanced technology, notably in the nanoscale design of functional materials.