Federico Rosei,
Professor,

INRS-MT, University of Quebec Canada Research Chair in Nanostructured Organic and Inorganic Materials

Overview

It has been a great honor and pleasure for me to serve as one of the Guest Editors for this volume of tutorial lectures from the latest edition of the Nano and Giga conference. Participating in the last two meetings (2004 in Poland and more recently 2007 in Arizona), and in particular co-editing this tutorial book, has been an exciting and rewarding experience and has significantly broadened my scientific horizons.

This book contains useful chapters that can be used as reference and lecture material for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. Each tutorial is a useful, self-contained lecture written for non-experts and the contents of this volume cover a broad range of research topic at the forefront and state of the art.

My personal fascination with nanoscience relates to the new (i.e., different from the bulk form) properties that a material may exhibit when at least one of its dimensions is reduced below 100 nm. I have always been fascinated by the Periodic Table of the Elements, and frustrated at the same time: why are there only 92 stable elements? Nanoscience partly resolves this frustration: since each element behaves differently (often in surprising ways) at the nanoscale, it gives the opportunity to extend, so to speak, the Periodic Table introducing new dimensions to it.

Today Nano , a prefix widely used in modern science (from the Greek word for dwarf), is an intrinsically rich...