ABSTRACT
One of the very basic results of the physics and chemistry of solids in the insight that most properties of solids depend on the microstructure, i.e. the chemical composition, the arrangement of the atoms (the atomic structure) and the size of a solid in one, two or three dimensions. In other words, if one changes one or several of these parameters, the properties of a solid vary. The most well-known example of the correlation between the atomic structure and the properties of a bulk material is probably the spectacular variation in the hardness of carbon when it transforms from diamond to graphite or vice versa.
