LMNT (Laboratory of Materials science and NanoTechnology), which belongs to University of Sassari, is located within the Porto Conte Ricerche science park, close to Alghero (SS). LMNT leads the Reference Centre for Materials with Controlled Porosity of Istituto Nazionale di Scienza e Tecnologia dei Materiali (INSTM).

 

Research activity

The research activity of the laboratory is dedicated to sol-gel science, nanoscience and nanotechnology, with a special focus on self-assembly phenomena.

Our current research activity is centred on the synthesise of mesoporous and hierarchically micro-mesostructured materials for a wide range advanced of applications from nanobiotechnology to photonics. Such materials are synthesized by a combination of sol-gel and supramolecular chemistry through self-assembly of templates that allows preparation of highly controlled porous materials in the mesoporous region (2-50 nm) and in the form of films, membranes and nanopowders. The applications span over many areas, such as photocatalysis, optoelectronic, sensor and bio-sensor for immobilization of biological species inside the pores with the chemical and site selectivity control.

We are also involved in the development of hybrid organic-inorganic materials by sol-gel processing for applications in photonics (such as waveguides, amplification, wavelength-selectivity filters) and memory storage.

In collaboration with SMEs we are developing and manufacturing advanced materials suitable for realizing the lab-on-a-chip devices, nanoparticles. The LNMT laboratory also provides specific support and analysis service on materials and nanomaterials.

 

Equipment

We have our standard lab-space for chemical synthesis of nanostructured materials (such as thin film, nonoparticles etc.) via soft chemistry technique, especially by sol-gel. There are variety of instruments such as thin film preparation instruments including dip-coater and spin-coater; spectroscopy charaterization of thin film, such as Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, UV-visible spectroscopy, Fluorescence spectroscopy, Ellipsometry, optical microscope; dynamic light scattering for charaterization the dimension of nanoparticles; atomic force microscope (AFM) for topographic analyzing of the superficial structure with atomic resolution. More details...