Structure of Nanoparticles
The structure of a nanoparticle of a material is generally determined by the chemical composition of the material, the number of atoms in the particle, and the character of the chemical interaction between atoms. Nanoparticles can have a regular crystalline structure, can be amorphous, or can form a pseudoclose packing undescribable by any of the crystallographic space groups. For each of these structural states of a nanoparticle, there is a certain set of numbers of the atoms involved in the particle that corresponds to optimum stable configurations. These numbers are usually called the magic numbers.
