Talk:Nanocluster

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 7 January 2022 and 18 March 2022. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Sandesf, Ziyu 'Kevin' Zhang (article contribs).

This article needs a lot of help

(And I'd fix it myself if I were sufficiently expert.)

It purports to be about (all) nanoclusters, but the first sentence of its lead is explicitly restricted to metal nanoclusters. Likewise, the very next sentence refers to "these nanoclusters."

Furthermore, that first sentence of the lead says nothing more about metal nanoclusters than to describe their makeup. That's as if the Wikipedia article on families were to begin "A family consists of people."

The section titled "History of Nanoclusters" is curious. It asserts that the concept "dates to prehistoric times," which conjures an image of stone-age hunter-gatherers huddled round a campfire squabbling about the Compton wavelength of the electron. This whole section seems a complete muddle of the physical/chemical objects and our scientific thinking about those objects. OK, so C₆₀ seems to have been created in the Big Bang. Does that assertion truly merit the label "history"? The sequence of timeframes mentioned in the section is: prehistory, the creation of the universe, and the 1950s and 60s.

In contrast with the lead, the history section explicitly mentions semiconductor nanoclusters.

The section on number of atoms and size walks us through some high-school algebra per "the Japanese scientist R. Kubo" (would it matter if he had been, say Portuguese?) to conclude—I gather—that no gold nanocluster can involve more than 220 atoms. From that it seems to infer that all nanoclusters have bounded size.

The final sentence in the article (before the further reading and references) is, "To enhance a given property of nanoclusters, a proper synthesis route and proper scaffold to stabilize them must be chosen."

Contrary to Wikipedia guidelines, the article's title is in the plural. (See WP:SINGULAR.) And by the way, the singluar form already plays in the organization of Wikipedia: it redirects to nanoparticle. And that latter article bears a recently added notice of a proposal to merge in "ultrafine particle."

—PaulTanenbaum (talk) 14:07, 24 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed merge of Atom cluster with Nanocluster

Article seems to describe the same topic, with the other one being better written. However, this article also covers content not in the other one, such as the stability criteria. –LaundryPizza03 (d c̄) 20:29, 20 February 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I do think a merge of some kind makes sense. From my POV there are also some serious problems with both articles, and although merging would help, a great deal needs to be done in order for this material to be encyclopedic. The atom cluster article is actually focused on covalently bound cluster systems, which are not the only kinds of systems that chemists refer to as "clusters." The same term is used to clusters for which the interaction energy is dominated by van der Waals forces. For one example of a non-covalent cluster system, see water cluster....the helium cation and neutral clusters have been studied for decades, see https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/1.3489346. On the other hand, the nanocluster article is solely focused on metal clusters, as was rightly pointed out. So yes, merge them, but let's also make the resulting article more general. I'll be available to help with that. Qflib, aka KeeYou Flib (talk) 17:36, 10 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Merger complete. Klbrain (talk) 11:48, 30 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not very good, but maybe harmless

The topic of this article is ill-defined. Presently, it is a magnet for musings, primary references, and loosely related factoids. It would take a lot of work to repair, so maybe we just leave it as harmless.--Smokefoot (talk) 15:48, 12 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]