ABSTRACT

Over the last few years, a variety of inorganic nanomaterials such as nanoparticles, nanow-ires, and nanotubes have been created or modified in order to obtain superior properties with greater functional versatility. The advent of nanoscale science and technology has stimulated a big effort to develop new strategies for the synthesis of nanomaterials of a controlled size and shape. In particular, nanoparticles due to their size, in the range of 1–100 nm, have been examined for their uses as tools for a new generation of technological devices. Moreover, due to their dimensions and shapes being similar to several biological structures (e.g., membrane cell genes, proteins, and viruses), they have been proposed for investigating biological processes as well as for sensing and treating diseases. Nowadays, the volume of studies dealing with these topics represents one of the most impressive phenomenon in all of scientific history. Even so only one Nobel prize, shared by three scientists, has been awarded for the development of the studies in this field in the last 20 years, in 1996, Robert F. Curl Jr., Sir Harold W. Kroto, and Richard E. Smalley were awarded for their discovery of fullerenes. In Figure 1.1, the number of scientific articles and papers with reference to the themes of nanoparticles from 1996 until 2009 is reported: the exponential trend clearly indicates that the scientific and technological interest is continuing to increase.