Short Communication: Synthesis of Polymer-Embedded Metal Clusters by Thermolysis of Mercaptides—Polymer Blends

Small conductive solid phases (metals and semiconductors) behave much different from ordinary bulk materials, because of surface and confinement effects. As a result, novel optical, magnetic, catalytic, and electronic properties become available. These new properties can be used to provide polymers of special functionalities and the resulting nanocomposite materials can be exploited for a number of functional applications in many technological fields (e.g., linear and nonlinear optics, magnetic data-storage, sensors). The research activity in this area is very promising and it is mainly devoted to development of chemical routes for the preparation of these systems, which allows one to achieve polymer-embedded particles of different shape, size, and spatial organization (the properties of nanoscale metals and semiconductors are size-dependent and consequently they can be finely tuned by controlling the morphology). There is also a strong interest for polymetallic particles (e.g., core/shell clusters), nano...