As the age of fossil fuels is coming to an end, now more than ever there is the need for more efficient and sustainable renewable energy technologies. This presentation will give an overview on recent developments in solar technologies that may address, in part the energy challenge. In particular, nanostructured materials synthesized via the bottom–up approach present an opportunity for future generation low cost manufacturing of devices [1]. We demonstrate various strategies to control nanostructure assembly, to design and synthesize functional materials that will help address the energy challenge. We study, in particular, multifunctional materials, namely materials that exhibit more than one functionality, and structure/property relationships in such systems, including for example: (i) control of size and luminescence properties of semiconductor nanostructures, synthesized by reactive laser ablation [2]; (ii) we devised new strategies for synthesizing multifunctional nanoscale materials to be used for applications electronics and photovoltaics [3-26].

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