Directed Self-Assembly of Ultrasmall Metal Nanoclusters

Directed self-assembly (DSA) of nanoparticles plays a key role in customizing advanced functional materials via collective and synergetic properties between neighbored building blocks. In comparison to the blossom of DSA in large (>3 nm) nanoparticle system witnessed in the past decades, the development of DSA in the sub-two-nanometer regime (e.g., underlying chemistry, fundamental properties of assemblies and potential applications) markedly lags behind. Thanks to continuous progress in synthetic chemistry and total structure determination of atomically precise metal nanoclusters (NCs,