Well, the last time I called home, my mother was curious what actually I am doing in the labs, and what my researches are. I tried to explain her, but I failed to give her a good understanding and impressions. So, i decided to write it down and will try to explain her again when i call home next time… Here we go..
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I have estimated how many letters there are in the Encyclopaedia, and I have assumed that each of my 24 million books is as big as an Encyclopaedia volume, and have calculated, then, how many bits of information there are: 1015. For each bit I allow 100 atoms. And it turns out that all the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide, which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom. (Richard P. Feynman).
In the last few years, human life has been revolutionized by miniaturization of lots of electronic equipment. This is based on cheap integrated electronic circuits comprised of devices and wires with sub-micrometer dimensions. These integrated circuits are now omnipresent, controlling everything from our auto mobiles to our home appliances. Even further miniaturization beyond sub-micrometer dimensions seems possible. And so we are compelled to explore science and technology on a new, even smaller scale: the nanometre scale, which leads us towards nanotechnology. And then, imagine if we can shrink all the information in Encyclopaedia Britannica or Library of congress into a device the size of a sugar cube? or even detecting the cancers when they are only a few cell in size? These are also the potential applications of nanotechnology. Such dreams come true. Nanotechnology has energized so much excitement and imagination not only among the scientific community but also the general public and movie-makers.
What is nanotechnology? maybe, the simplest answer is, Nanotechnology is any technology which exploits phenomena and structures that can only occur at the nanometre scale, which is the scale of single atoms and small molecules. It, thus, involves manipulation of matter at the scale of single atoms. ( 1nm= 0,000000001 m, or one billionth m). While methods allowing for fabrication of smaller devices have always given impacts to new economic opportunities, fabrication of nanometre scale is especially significant as this is the approximate size of the largest biological molecules: DNA and proteins. It is at this level where, over the next decade, the smallest length scale reachable by humans, and the largest molecular length of nature, will coincide. It’s clear that nanotechnology brings opportunities for material and devices capable of tremendously improving the human life quality.
As the foundation of nano science and nanotechnology, nanoscale materials, or nanomaterials, have become one of the most popular research topics in a very short period of time. Nanomaterials can be defined as materials with at least one dimension that is on nanometer scale. To date, a lot of new group researches with nano-brand are appeared everywhere, since tremendous money and fund have been allocated to this field of research. The interest of nanotechnology has been fuelled by huge economical, technological and scientific impact anticipated in several areas, a) The exponential growth of capacity and speed of semiconducting chips, the component that virtually enable all modern technologies, is rapidly approaching their limit of art and demands new technology and new materials; b) nanomaterials and devices hold great potential, from energy, household appliances, to medical applications; and c) If a material is reduced to the dimension of the nanometer, which is only tens of a hydrogen atom dimension, its properties can be drastically different from those of either bulk(solid) material that we can see and touch even though the composition is essentially the same, or the atoms or molecules that make up materials.
In the last decade, microelectronics and computers have penetrated every aspect of our life. The industry has been able to keep up with the demand by exponentially increasing memory density and the speed of the semiconducting chips (remember Moore’s Law?), namely increasing the memory capacity every three years or even less. Remember, the evolution of intel processor, from intel 486 to nowadays centrino and from centrino to centrino duo take less and less time. The main mechanism that has enabled this exponential growth is through the reduction in size of the individual chips. Nowadays, the relevant length scale in the fabrication of many new devices has reached nanometer scale. For example, the common computer chip fabrication has reached the length scale of about 150nm in commercial industry. Speaking about laboratories results, News.com reported on March 1st 2005 that Intel is preparing to introduce processors with features measuring 65 nanometers. The company’s current engineers believe that 5 nanometer processes are actually proving themselves to be more and more feasible. The company showed pictures of these transistor prototypes measuring 65, 45, 32, and 22 nanometers. However, the company spoke about how their expectations for the future are for new processors featuring 15,10, 7, and 5 nanometers. Researcher from Hewlett Packard Lab have reported that they have been able to develop nanochips up to 5nm. These results are waiting to be implemented in real world and daily appliances.
In medical and human health, lot of progress have been achieved. Gold particles modified with specific DNA strands, antibody labelled with magnetic particles, and antibody coded nanobars seem to promise easy and quick detection of protein molecules. The developments of what so-called nanorobot, a small tiny object that can bring medicine right to the area of the body that need treatments, detecting and killing the cancer cells while they were still young, seems promising and at their progress.
Many achievements have been reached so far. And yes, as many as its advantages, nanotechnology will also impact the social life of human. However, we do hope that the development of nanotechnology will improve the quality of human life.
Bielefeld, 09 Feb 2006,
-Mudeng _di_LAb-
Refs:
1. "Self-assembled Nanostructures" by Zhang, Jin Z, 2003
2. Wikipedia,
2. My own master thesis.
