Nano Technology

Do you know what Is Nanotechnology?

        When talking about nano technology, Nanotechnology is science, engineering, and technology conducted at the Nano scale, which is about 1 to 100 nanometres.

        Nano science and nanotechnology are the study and application of extremely small things and can be used across all the other science fields, such as chemistry, biology, physics, materials science, and engineering.

        The ideas and concepts behind Nano science and nanotechnology started with a talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom” by physicist Richard Feynman at an American Physical Society meeting at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) on December 29, 1959, long before the term nanotechnology was used. In his talk, Feynman described a process in which scientists would be able to manipulate and control individual atoms and molecules. Over a decade later, in his explorations of ultra-precision machining, Professor Norio Taniguchi coined the term nanotechnology. It wasn't until 1981, with the development of the scanning tunnelling microscope that could "see" individual atoms, that modern nanotechnology began.

 It’s hard to imagine just how small nanotechnology is. One nanometre is a billionth of a meter, or 10^-9 of a meter. 

        Nano science and nanotechnology involve the ability to see and to control individual atoms and molecules. Everything on Earth is made up of atoms—the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the buildings and houses we live in, and our own bodies.

        But something as small as an atom is impossible to see with the naked eye. In fact, it’s impossible to see with the microscopes typically used in a high school science classes. The microscopes needed to see things at the Nano scale were invented in the early 1980s.

        Once scientists had the right tools, such as the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) and the atomic force microscope (AFM), the age of nanotechnology was born.

        Although modern Nano science and nanotechnology are quite new, Nano scale materials were used for centuries. Alternate-sized gold and silver particles created colours in the stained glass windows of medieval churches hundreds of years ago. The artists back then just didn’t know that the process they used to create these beautiful works of art actually led to changes in the composition of the materials they were working with.

        Today's scientists and engineers are finding a wide variety of ways to deliberately make materials at the Nano scale to take advantage of their enhanced properties such as higher strength, lighter weight, increased control of light spectrum, and greater chemical reactivity than their larger-scale counterparts.