Nanotechnology deals with

Eric Drexler used the term "nanotechnology" in his book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology , which proposed the idea of a nanoscale "assembler" which would be able to build a copy of itself and of other items of arbitrary complexity with atomic control. Also in , Drexler co-founded The Foresight Institute with which he is no longer affiliated to help increase public awareness and understanding of nanotechnology concepts and implications.

Significance of Nanotechnology in Wearable Electronics

The emergence of nanotechnology as a field in the s occurred through convergence of Drexler's theoretical and public work, which developed and popularized a conceptual framework for nanotechnology, and high-visibility experimental advances that drew additional wide-scale attention to the prospects of atomic control of matter.

Since the popularity spike in the s, most of nanotechnology has involved investigation of several approaches to making mechanical devices out of a small number of atoms. In the s, two major breakthroughs sparked the growth of nanotechnology in modern era. First, the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope in which provided unprecedented visualization of individual atoms and bonds, and was successfully used to manipulate individual atoms in In the early s, the field garnered increased scientific, political, and commercial attention that led to both controversy and progress.

Controversies emerged regarding the definitions and potential implications of nanotechnologies, exemplified by the Royal Society 's report on nanotechnology. Meanwhile, commercialization of products based on advancements in nanoscale technologies began emerging. These products are limited to bulk applications of nanomaterials and do not involve atomic control of matter.

Some examples include the Silver Nano platform for using silver nanoparticles as an antibacterial agent, nanoparticle -based transparent sunscreens, carbon fiber strengthening using silica nanoparticles, and carbon nanotubes for stain-resistant textiles. Governments moved to promote and fund research into nanotechnology, such as in the U. By the mids new and serious scientific attention began to flourish. Projects emerged to produce nanotechnology roadmaps [27] [28] which center on atomically precise manipulation of matter and discuss existing and projected capabilities, goals, and applications.

The top five organizations that published the most scientific papers on nanotechnology research between and were the Chinese Academy of Sciences , Russian Academy of Sciences , Centre national de la recherche scientifique , University of Tokyo and Osaka University. Nanotechnology is the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. This covers both current work and concepts that are more advanced. In its original sense, nanotechnology refers to the projected ability to construct items from the bottom up, using techniques and tools being developed today to make complete, high performance products.

By comparison, typical carbon-carbon bond lengths , or the spacing between these atoms in a molecule , are in the range 0. By convention, nanotechnology is taken as the scale range 1 to nm following the definition used by the National Nanotechnology Initiative in the US. The lower limit is set by the size of atoms hydrogen has the smallest atoms, which are approximately a quarter of a nm kinetic diameter since nanotechnology must build its devices from atoms and molecules. The upper limit is more or less arbitrary but is around the size below which phenomena not observed in larger structures start to become apparent and can be made use of in the nano device.

To put that scale in another context, the comparative size of a nanometer to a meter is the same as that of a marble to the size of the earth. Two main approaches are used in nanotechnology. In the "bottom-up" approach, materials and devices are built from molecular components which assemble themselves chemically by principles of molecular recognition.

Areas of physics such as nanoelectronics , nanomechanics , nanophotonics and nanoionics have evolved during the last few decades to provide a basic scientific foundation of nanotechnology. Several phenomena become pronounced as the size of the system decreases. These include statistical mechanical effects, as well as quantum mechanical effects, for example the " quantum size effect" where the electronic properties of solids are altered with great reductions in particle size.

Nanotechnology: Research Examples and How to Get Into the Field

This effect does not come into play by going from macro to micro dimensions. However, quantum effects can become significant when the nanometer size range is reached, typically at distances of nanometers or less, the so-called quantum realm. Additionally, a number of physical mechanical, electrical, optical, etc. One example is the increase in surface area to volume ratio altering mechanical, thermal and catalytic properties of materials. Diffusion and reactions at nanoscale, nanostructures materials and nanodevices with fast ion transport are generally referred to nanoionics. Mechanical properties of nanosystems are of interest in the nanomechanics research.

The catalytic activity of nanomaterials also opens potential risks in their interaction with biomaterials. Materials reduced to the nanoscale can show different properties compared to what they exhibit on a macroscale, enabling unique applications. For instance, opaque substances can become transparent copper ; stable materials can turn combustible aluminium ; insoluble materials may become soluble gold. A material such as gold, which is chemically inert at normal scales, can serve as a potent chemical catalyst at nanoscales.

Much of the fascination with nanotechnology stems from these quantum and surface phenomena that matter exhibits at the nanoscale. Modern synthetic chemistry has reached the point where it is possible to prepare small molecules to almost any structure. These methods are used today to manufacture a wide variety of useful chemicals such as pharmaceuticals or commercial polymers. This ability raises the question of extending this kind of control to the next-larger level, seeking methods to assemble these single molecules into supramolecular assemblies consisting of many molecules arranged in a well defined manner.

The concept of molecular recognition is especially important: molecules can be designed so that a specific configuration or arrangement is favored due to non-covalent intermolecular forces.

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The Watson—Crick basepairing rules are a direct result of this, as is the specificity of an enzyme being targeted to a single substrate , or the specific folding of the protein itself. Thus, two or more components can be designed to be complementary and mutually attractive so that they make a more complex and useful whole. Such bottom-up approaches should be capable of producing devices in parallel and be much cheaper than top-down methods, but could potentially be overwhelmed as the size and complexity of the desired assembly increases.

Most useful structures require complex and thermodynamically unlikely arrangements of atoms. Nevertheless, there are many examples of self-assembly based on molecular recognition in biology , most notably Watson—Crick basepairing and enzyme-substrate interactions. The challenge for nanotechnology is whether these principles can be used to engineer new constructs in addition to natural ones.

Molecular nanotechnology, sometimes called molecular manufacturing, describes engineered nanosystems nanoscale machines operating on the molecular scale. Molecular nanotechnology is especially associated with the molecular assembler , a machine that can produce a desired structure or device atom-by-atom using the principles of mechanosynthesis. Manufacturing in the context of productive nanosystems is not related to, and should be clearly distinguished from, the conventional technologies used to manufacture nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes and nanoparticles. When the term "nanotechnology" was independently coined and popularized by Eric Drexler who at the time was unaware of an earlier usage by Norio Taniguchi it referred to a future manufacturing technology based on molecular machine systems.

The premise was that molecular scale biological analogies of traditional machine components demonstrated molecular machines were possible: by the countless examples found in biology, it is known that sophisticated, stochastically optimised biological machines can be produced. It is hoped that developments in nanotechnology will make possible their construction by some other means, perhaps using biomimetic principles.

However, Drexler and other researchers [38] have proposed that advanced nanotechnology, although perhaps initially implemented by biomimetic means, ultimately could be based on mechanical engineering principles, namely, a manufacturing technology based on the mechanical functionality of these components such as gears, bearings, motors, and structural members that would enable programmable, positional assembly to atomic specification. In general it is very difficult to assemble devices on the atomic scale, as one has to position atoms on other atoms of comparable size and stickiness.

Another view, put forth by Carlo Montemagno , [40] is that future nanosystems will be hybrids of silicon technology and biological molecular machines. Richard Smalley argued that mechanosynthesis are impossible due to the difficulties in mechanically manipulating individual molecules. Leaders in research on non-biological molecular machines are Dr. An experiment indicating that positional molecular assembly is possible was performed by Ho and Lee at Cornell University in They used a scanning tunneling microscope to move an individual carbon monoxide molecule CO to an individual iron atom Fe sitting on a flat silver crystal, and chemically bound the CO to the Fe by applying a voltage.

The nanomaterials field includes subfields which develop or study materials having unique properties arising from their nanoscale dimensions. These seek to develop components of a desired functionality without regard to how they might be assembled. These subfields seek to anticipate what inventions nanotechnology might yield, or attempt to propose an agenda along which inquiry might progress. These often take a big-picture view of nanotechnology, with more emphasis on its societal implications than the details of how such inventions could actually be created.

Nanomaterials can be classified in 0D, 1D, 2D and 3D nanomaterials. The dimensionality play a major role in determining the characteristic of nanomaterials including physical , chemical and biological characteristics. With the decrease in dimensionality, an increase in surface-to-volume ratio is observed. This indicate that smaller dimensional nanomaterials have higher surface area compared to 3D nanomaterials. Recently, two dimensional 2D nanomaterials are extensively investigated for electronic , biomedical , drug delivery and biosensor applications. There are several important modern developments.

There are other types of scanning probe microscopy. Although conceptually similar to the scanning confocal microscope developed by Marvin Minsky in and the scanning acoustic microscope SAM developed by Calvin Quate and coworkers in the s, newer scanning probe microscopes have much higher resolution, since they are not limited by the wavelength of sound or light. The tip of a scanning probe can also be used to manipulate nanostructures a process called positional assembly.

Feature-oriented scanning methodology may be a promising way to implement these nanomanipulations in automatic mode. Various techniques of nanolithography such as optical lithography , X-ray lithography , dip pen nanolithography, electron beam lithography or nanoimprint lithography were also developed. Lithography is a top-down fabrication technique where a bulk material is reduced in size to nanoscale pattern.

Another group of nanotechnological techniques include those used for fabrication of nanotubes and nanowires , those used in semiconductor fabrication such as deep ultraviolet lithography, electron beam lithography, focused ion beam machining, nanoimprint lithography, atomic layer deposition, and molecular vapor deposition, and further including molecular self-assembly techniques such as those employing di-block copolymers. The precursors of these techniques preceded the nanotech era, and are extensions in the development of scientific advancements rather than techniques which were devised with the sole purpose of creating nanotechnology and which were results of nanotechnology research.

The top-down approach anticipates nanodevices that must be built piece by piece in stages, much as manufactured items are made. Scanning probe microscopy is an important technique both for characterization and synthesis of nanomaterials. Atomic force microscopes and scanning tunneling microscopes can be used to look at surfaces and to move atoms around.

Nanotechnology - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

By designing different tips for these microscopes, they can be used for carving out structures on surfaces and to help guide self-assembling structures. By using, for example, feature-oriented scanning approach, atoms or molecules can be moved around on a surface with scanning probe microscopy techniques.

In contrast, bottom-up techniques build or grow larger structures atom by atom or molecule by molecule. These techniques include chemical synthesis, self-assembly and positional assembly.


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Dual polarisation interferometry is one tool suitable for characterisation of self assembled thin films. Another variation of the bottom-up approach is molecular beam epitaxy or MBE. Alfred Y. Cho, and Art C. Gossard developed and implemented MBE as a research tool in the late s and s. Samples made by MBE were key to the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall effect for which the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded.

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MBE allows scientists to lay down atomically precise layers of atoms and, in the process, build up complex structures. Important for research on semiconductors, MBE is also widely used to make samples and devices for the newly emerging field of spintronics. However, new therapeutic products, based on responsive nanomaterials, such as the ultradeformable, stress-sensitive Transfersome vesicles, are under development and already approved for human use in some countries. Because of the variety of potential applications including industrial and military , governments have invested billions of dollars in nanotechnology research.

As of August 21, , the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies estimates that over manufacturer-identified nanotech products are publicly available, with new ones hitting the market at a pace of 3—4 per week.


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  • Most applications are limited to the use of "first generation" passive nanomaterials which includes titanium dioxide in sunscreen, cosmetics, surface coatings, [67] and some food products; Carbon allotropes used to produce gecko tape ; silver in food packaging, clothing, disinfectants and household appliances; zinc oxide in sunscreens and cosmetics, surface coatings, paints and outdoor furniture varnishes; and cerium oxide as a fuel catalyst.

    Further applications allow tennis balls to last longer, golf balls to fly straighter, and even bowling balls to become more durable and have a harder surface.

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