Symposium S, 'Nanostructured Metal Oxides for Advanced Applications', was held April 1-5 at the 2013 MRS Spring Meeting in San Francisco, California. Metal oxides represent an appealing and assorted class of materials, whose properties cover the entire range from metals to semiconductors to insulators and almost all aspects of material science, chemistry and physics in a very broad application area. In the past few years, progress has been made on the synthesis, structural, physical, and chemical characterization of self-assembled and hierarchically assembled metal oxide nanostructures that exhibit size-dependent properties. In these proceedings, attention is paid to the synthesis, structural and functional characterization of self-assembled nanostructures and architectures of all metal oxides with application potentials, with particular consideration given to the capability to tailor and control material properties via surface and structural modifications.

As a platform for nanoscience and nanotechnology, nanorods have witnessed an explosion of interest in recent years because of the various types, advances in synthesis, and the novel thermal, optoelectronic, chemical and mechanical properties due to their unique one-dimensional geometry. Given many new functions and/or greatly enhanced performance promisingly offered by the semiconductor nanorods, as well as the demand for ever more compact and powerful systems, nanorods surpass the traditional films and emerge as a significant class of materials. This book reviews the main strategies to fabricate nanorod building blocks which are available to researchers, the unique properties offered by nanorods, and potential exciting applications in electrical and optoelectronic devices with our focus on light emitters.