Quasi-epitaxial growth of [Ru(bpy)3 ](2+) by confinement in clay nanoplatelets yields polarized emission

Supramolecular Organization in Confined Nanospaces

Empty spaces are abhorred by nature, which immediately rushes in to fill the void. Humans have learnt pretty well how to make ordered empty nanocontainers, and to get useful products out of them. When such an order is imparted to molecules, new properties may appear, often yielding advanced applications. This review illustrates how the organized void space inherently present in various materials: zeolites, clathrates, mesoporous silica/organosilica, and metal organic frameworks (MOF), for example, can be exploited to create confined, organized, and self-assembled supramolecular structures of low dimensionality. Features of the confining matrices relevant to organization are presented with special focus on molecular-level aspects. Selected examples of confined supramolecular assemblies - from small molecules to quantum dots or luminescent species - are aimed to show the complexity and potential of this approach. Natural confinement (minerals) and hyperconfinement (high pressure) provide further opportunities to understand and master the atomistic-level interactions governing supramolecular organization under nanospace restrictions.

A review of the structure and dynamics of nanoconfined water and ionic liquids via molecular dynamics simulation

During the past decade, the research on fluids in nanoconfined geometries has received considerable attention as a consequence of their wide applications in different fields. Several nanoconfined systems such as water and ionic liquids, together with an equally impressive array of nanoconfining media such as carbon nanotube, graphene and graphene oxide have received increasingly growing interest in the past years. Water is the first system that has been reviewed in this article, due to its important role in transport phenomena in environmental sciences. Water is often considered as a highly nanoconfined system, due to its reduction to a few layers of water molecules between the extended surface of large macromolecules. The second system discussed here is ionic liquids, which have been widely studied in the modern green chemistry movement. Considering the great importance of ionic liquids in industry, and also their oil/water counterpart, nanoconfined ionic liquid system has become an important area of research with many fascinating applications. Furthermore, the method of molecular dynamics simulation is one of the major tools in the theoretical study of water and ionic liquids in nanoconfinement, which increasingly has been joined with experimental procedures. In this way, the choice of water and ionic liquids in nanoconfinement is justified by applying molecular dynamics simulation approaches in this review article.