Chemistry World Blog

— ISACS2revised399_tcm18-165163

The final day of ISACS2 presented the two remaining speakers with a tough task – keeping the audience’s attention with the sun shining on the beautiful city of Budapest outside. But both stepped up to the challenge.

Teri Odom from Northwestern University in Illinois, US, woke everyone up with her group’s work on highly structured nanomaterials. Her team has developed a way of making very uniform sized pyramidal ‘ice cream cone’ nanoparticles, which they can then stack one inside another to make super-strong particles for Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) spectroscopy. But the group gets a double whammy of interesting nanomaterials, because for every batch of the pyramidal shells they make, they also get a sheet of gold with an array of nano-sized holes in it.

Tianquan Lian from Emory University in Atlanta, US, closed off the meeting with a pleasing symmetry – his talk was about harnessing the power of multiple excitons (electron and ‘hole’ pairs) in quantum dots, which echoed some of Moungi Bawendi’s work from the very first talk of the meeting. Lian explained that being able to collect the energy from multiple excitons in a single quantum dot should allow us to make more efficient solar cells and light emitting devices, but requires a delicate balance of the right size dots and molecules attached to the surface that can harvest the excited electrons fast enough.

As he closed the meeting, the RSC’s editorial director, Jim Milne, gave us a sneak preview of what next year’s ISACS meetings have in store, so here’s something to whet your appetite if you didn’t manage to make it to any of this year’s meetings.
The themes will be:
Chemical biology (in Manchester, UK);
Energy (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, US);
Organic, materials and supramolecular chemistry (at Peking University in Beijing, China).

Phillip Broadwith