Faraday Discussion : Nanoparticle Synthesis and Assembly Recent advancements in nanoparticle research

Faraday Discussions are unique international meetings that focus on miscellaneous areas of chemistry and have been held for over 100 years. The format of these meetings is distinctive because delegates submit their papers in advance and these are distributed to all the participants prior to the meeting. During the meeting, the presenting authors are given fi ve minutes to summarise the key points of their work and the remaining time is devoted to discussing the papers. The conference was held at Argonne National Laboratory, USA, from 20th to 22nd April 2015 and was jointly organised by the Royal Society of Chemistry, UK, the Department of Physics, Kansas State University, USA, and Argonne National Laboratory. There were approximately 130 delegates representing 23 countries. The programme consisted of 10 invited talks, 14 paper presentations, 72 poster presentations and 12 lightning poster presentations upon invitation by the scientifi c committee. The themes that were covered include: • Nanoparticle synthesis – physical chemistry of nanoparticle shape and ligand control • Theoretical insights into nanoparticle synthesis and nanoparticle assembly • Nanoparticle self-assembly • Nanoparticle directed assembly.