Special Issue Preface pubs.acs.org/JPCC
Preface to the Special Issue “ISSPIC XVIII: International Symposium on Small Particles and Inorganic Clusters 2016”
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his Special Issue contains 48 invited, peer-reviewed original research articles collected on the occasion of the 18th International Symposium on Small Particles and Inorganic Clusters (ISSPIC XVIII), held August 14−19, 2016, in Jyväskylä, Finland. The conference gathered about 225 participants from 25 countries all over the world. The program consisted of 9 plenary lectures, 24 invited talks, 2 memorial lectures, 38 short “hot topic” talks selected from contributed abstracts, and 107 poster presentations. The ISSPIC conference series started in 1976 in Lyon, France. For 40 years, it has been one of the premier conferences in the areas of atomic and molecular clusters, nanoparticles, and nanostructures.1 The conference has provided an interdisciplinary forum for presentations and discussion of fundamental and technological developments in these fields. Researchers in the ISSPIC community have been working on nanoscience long before the term became as popular as it is today. From its start, one central theme in the field has been to try to understand how matter organizes itself from the atomic and molecular dimensions to nanoparticle regime and finally to bulk and how the various physical and chemical properties of a nanometer-size chunk of material are affected by its dimensionality, size, and the environment. ISSPIC XVIII made an effort to enhance the visibility of cluster science to neighboring areas of nanoparticle catalysis, interface chemistry, plasmonics, biological systems, and research on climate change while not forgetting the traditional themes in the field. It is our sincere hope that cluster science continues to be vibrant and will renew itself for the many upcoming ISSPIC conferences, the next one being organized in August 2018 in Hangzhou, China. Very many great scientists have been influential in the ISSPIC community, starting from the organizer of the very first ISSPIC, the late Jacques Friedel. With sadness but much gratitude, at ISSPIC XVIII we paid tribute to two of the greatest names in cluster science, recently passed away: T. Patrick Martin (1936− 2015) and 1996 Nobel Laureate, Sir Harry Kroto (1939−2016). It is hoped that their scientific legacy and example, briefly reviewed below, will motivate new generations of cluster scientists to explore the world of unknown.
Photo Credit: Margaret Kroto
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SIR HAROLD KROTO (1939−2016) Sir Harold Kroto, a pioneer in nanotechnology, died on April 30, 2016. He is survived by his wife Margaret and their sons Stephen and David. Kroto, born October 7, 1939 as the son of refugees from Germany, grew up in Bolton, U.K., studied at Sheffield University for his B.S. and Ph.D., and spent 3 years in laboratories in the U.S. before joining a newly formed school of Chemistry & Molecular Sciences at the University of Sussex, U.K. as a tutorial Photo Credit: Giorgio Benedek
Special Issue: ISSPIC XVIII: International Symposium on Small Particles and Inorganic Clusters 2016 Published: May 25, 2017
© 2017 American Chemical Society
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b01997 J. Phys. Chem. C 2017, 121, 10629−10631
Special Issue Preface
The Journal of Physical Chemistry C
As early as 1972, 4 years before the first ISSPIC was held in Lyon, terms such as Microcrystals and Small Particles appeared in the titles of Pat’s publications. Initially he studied clusters isolated in matrices, but by the time ISSPIC-2 convened in Lausanne, Pat’s group had developed a versatile gas aggregation source that allowed them to form elemental and compound clusters from almost all main-group elements. His exploration of the “growth spiral” of metal halide clusters, both experimentally and theoretically, culminated in a widely cited review article.5 In 1989, Pat’s group developed a time-of-flight mass spectrometer that pushed the size limit of gas-phase clusters that could be detected and resolved from a typical value of 102 to beyond 104. Augmented by methods to heat neutral precursors before ionization, postheating nascent ions, and near-threshold ionization, they identified stability patterns in a wide range of systems. Magic numbers in alkali metal clusters and alkali-coated fullerenes revealed the effects of electronic shell and supershell structure; in alkaline-earth metal clusters, clusters of fullerenes, and metal-coated fullerenes they revealed geometric shells and structural transitions. Methods to vary the temperature of clusters were employed to study the transition from electronic shells in small systems to geometrical shells in larger ones. Postionization heating was employed to determine the minimum size of highly charged alkali clusters at their fission limit. The overarching topic in Pat’s work was to understand “how a solid evolves during the earliest stages of growth”, as he wrote in “Shells of Atoms,” a comprehensive review published in 1996.6 Pat had an unmatched ability to view atomic arrangements in three dimensions, which helped him interpret features in mass spectra that did not mesh with previous patterns, such as those that signal the tendency of aluminum clusters to form octahedral shapes. At the MPI Pat had no formal teaching obligations, but he would have made a brilliant instructor. His many invited talks at nearly every ISSPIC, Gordon Research Conferences and many other international meetings in the eighties and nineties were exercises in clarity. They were highly tutorial; he did not assume any familiarity with his prior work. Pat was a quiet person, rarely found at the center of large social gatherings, but he enjoyed speaking in front of large audiences. He would present conflicting results to build tension, deliberately lead you astray with obvious but incorrect interpretations, and finally present a compelling explanation to solve the puzzle. Occasionally he would even let the audience choose the subject of his talk. His publications reflected the same unconventional, tutorial style; he would directly address the reader and guide her through the story that he had to tell. Pat’s interests extended beyond research. He organized two summer schools in Erice, Italy, which drew large numbers of graduate students and lecturers. He opened a meeting with a detailed history of Sicily, enriched with his own drawings and poems. He will be remembered as a quiet, gentle, kind, unique person whose extraordinary insight advanced science.
fellow. He was promoted to Professor in Chemistry in 1985. He left Sussex in 2004 to join Florida State University in Tallahassee and returned to Sussex in 2015. Kroto’s early work in microwave spectroscopy is characterized with elegance in mathematics and symmetry to explain selection rules in rotational spectra. Through collaboration with David Walton at Sussex, long carbon chains, such as HC5N, were synthesized in the laboratory and characterized with rotational spectroscopy. Observation of such spectra in interstellar matter initiated an interest to find other techniques in the laboratory to produce long carbon chains. Robert F. Curl, who Kroto knew from work in spectroscopy, recommended that he contact Richard E. Smalley at Rice University, Houston, to use the new laser vaporization technique. A very successful collaboration started with “the discovery of carbon atoms bound in the form of a ball”, today known as Carbon-60 (Fullerene-C60), the “buckyball” or Buckminsterfullerene.2 He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1996 with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for this work (see http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/ laureates/1996/). The ingenious hypothesis was that the Carbon-60 cluster was built up as a cage-shaped truncated icosahedron, wherein carbon atoms occupied each of 60 vertices. This form comprises 32 faces, 12 of which are pentagons and 20 are hexagons. Before 1985 it was generally accepted that elemental carbon existed in only two ordered forms (allotropes): diamond and graphite. However, the experimental proof of the postulated icosahedral structure remained elusive for several years. At the ISSPIC-5 meeting in Konstanz, September 10−14, 1990, Smalley was scheduled to talk on metal clusters but changed the topic to fullerenes. He started the talk to give 10 minutes to W. Krätschmer to present recent research using an electric carbon arc technique to produce soot containing macroscopic amounts of fullerenes. In 1982, Krätschmer and Huffman had already produced carbon soot with the hope to explain the rather intense interstellar absorption at 217 nm.3 By 1990 they had characterized the soot using IR and UV spectroscopy, showed that the soot dissolved in benzene with a reddish color, and produced small crystallites, which they characterized by X-ray diffraction.4 A new area of carbon-related research was born, in which Kroto was very active until he passed away, as documented with a very extensive overview of research and other activities at http://www.kroto.info/. Kroto was an inspired and entertaining lecturer with the goal of sharing his knowledge of science and, in particular, the C60 story with its soccer-ball structure with the public and especially with children in talks, workshops, and movies (http://www.vega. org.uk). In summary, the original discovery of C60 from fundamental research strategy in astrophysics and spectroscopy from 1985 to 1990 formed the basis for a new field of carbon-related materials in nanoscience and nanotechnology.
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THOMAS PATRICK MARTIN (1936−2015) Thomas Patrick Martin, a pioneer in cluster science, died on August 20, 2015, in Stuttgart. He is survived by his wife Anna and their two daughters. Pat, or just “TP”, was born on September 13, 1936 in Rochester, NY. He received his B.S. in Physics from MIT in 1958 and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Rochester, NY. After brief stints at the University of Illinois at Urbana− Champaign and Lehigh University he joined Prof. Genzel, the founding Director of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany, as a staff scientist in 1970.
Hannu Hak̈ kinen
University of Jyväskylä
Arne Rosen
University of Gothenburg
Olof Echt
University of New Hampshire
Mika Pettersson
University of Jyväskylä 10630
DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b01997 J. Phys. Chem. C 2017, 121, 10629−10631
Special Issue Preface
The Journal of Physical Chemistry C
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Financial support to ISSPIC XVIII was granted by the Finnish government through the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies and the Center for International Mobility (CIMO), Academy of Finland, and by the University of Jyväskylä through its Nanoscience Center and Department of Chemistry. We thank Catherine J. Murphy, JPC Deputy Editor, for accepting our proposal to publish this Special Issue in JPC C and Gemma C. Solomon, JPC Senior Editor, for managing the peer review of the contributions to this Special Issue.
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REFERENCES
(1) ISSPIC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISSPIC. (2) Kroto, H. W.; Heath, J. R.; O’Brien, S. C.; Curl, R. F.; Smalley, R. E. C60: Buckminsterfullerene. Nature 1985, 318, 162−163. (3) Krätschmer, W. The Story of Making Fullerenes. Nanoscale 2011, 3, 2485−2489. (4) Krätschmer, W.; Lamb, L. D.; Fostiropoulos, K.; Huffman, D. R. Solid C60: A New Form of Carbon. Nature 1990, 347, 354. (5) Martin, T. P. Alkali-Halide Clusters and Micro-Crystals. Phys. Rep. 1983, 95, 167−199. (6) Martin, T. P. Shells of Atoms. Phys. Rep. 1996, 273, 199−241.
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpcc.7b01997 J. Phys. Chem. C 2017, 121, 10629−10631
