Nanoparticles quantized energy

Figure 10.9. (a) Schematic structure of a silicon quantum dot crystal and (b) its calculated electronic structure as a function of interparticle distance H. The size of the nanoparticles is L = 6.5 nm. At small H, a splitting of the quantized energy levels of single dots results in the formation of three-dimensional minibands. Reproduced from Ref. 64, Copyright 2001, with permission from the American Institute of Physics. 

A clear, commonly accepted terminology to describe few-atom subnanoscale metals exhibiting quantized energy levels is lacking. The lack of a coherent terminology leads to confusion and may hamper development. In this chapter, we restrict the term metal cluster to describe few-atom metals with discrete energy levels, and use metal nanoparticle, for particles that have surface plasmon resonance effects (approximate size range between 1 and 100 nm). 

Small nanoparticles with quantized energy levels are sometimes referred to as artificial atoms. Although there is no central nucleus holding the electrons, a parabohc potential well holds the electrons, which can move in a two-dimensional plane in the well. 

In this section, we describe theoretical methods that describe the macroscopic optical properties of metal nanoparticles (a.k.a quantum dots). Recently, silver and gold nanoparticles have foimd tremendous use in biological assays, detection, labelling and sensing because of their sensitive optical spectra. While some works in the literature refer to these as quantum dots , in optical absorption experiments their quantized energy structure is not probed. The spectrum is a probe of the localized surface plasmon phenomenon, a collective electronic excitation that is localized in spatial extent owing to the small size of the nanoparticle compared with the wavelength. 

Figure 10.4. (a) Schematic energy diagrams of clusters, nanoparticles, and bulk semiconductors. (b) Manifestation of the size quantization effect as a color change of aqueous colloidal solutions of CdSe nanoparticles (courtesy of A. Rogach). The particle size changes from left to right from -1.5 to -4.5 nm. (c) Bulk CdSe crystal. (See color insert.)... 

Then, to heuristically introduce quantization of EM fields, one can assume that this power is due to the emission by the molecule of photons each carrying an energy tuo. By applying this procedure to a free-standing molecule (i.e. no metal nanoparticle), one would find that (see Sec. 1.5) ... 

---