5. Electronic properties

Quantum effects are most apparent when studying the electronic and optical properties of nanosystems. Nanosystems may have one or more nanometric dimensions. The characteristic length at which nanomaterial-specific properties appear is generally of the order of 10 nm or less. It is also possible to create a mesoscopic structure in which one, two or three dimensions are comparable to or smaller than this characteristic length L _c . The result is a system of dimension d = 2, 1 or 0.

When only one dimension is smaller than L _c , the resulting structure is said to be two-dimensional (2D). When two dimensions...