Nanotechnology
Manuel Figueroa
November 16, 2009
There’s Plenty of Room at
the Bottom…
"What would happen if we
could arrange the atoms
one by one the way we
want them?”
Richard P. Feynman, 1960
“Why cannot we write the
entire 24 volumes of the
Encyclopedia Britannica
on the head of the pin?”
Courtesy of The Archives, California Institute of Technology.
Writing in the microscale:
But can we go smaller?
How small is a
nanometer?
109 m - Moon’s
orbit around the
Earth – 1 million
kilometers away
101 m – Above
the tree line –
10 meters away
108 m - Our planet
Earth – 100,000
kilometers away
103 m - neighborhood
from above – 1
kilometer away
How small is a
nanometer?
10 -1 m – A
leaf at 10 cm
10-9 m –
Molecules
inside
chromosome
at 1
nanometer
10 -4 m – The
cells of a leaf at
100 microns
10-6 m – One cell of
a leaf at 1 micron
10-7 m – Chromosomes
inside the leaf cell at
0.1 micron
What does Nanotechnology
mean?
• Between 1 – 100 nm
– To put it in perspective, the size of 1
atom ~ 0.1 nm
– Or 50 nm is 1000 times smaller than the
thickness of a human hair
• Control the arrangement of atoms
(one by one)
• Any structure has to be consistent
with the laws of physics
• Manufacturing costs should be low
Possible Applications
Nanorods could be
used as tiny heat
pumps
Carbon nanotubes used to
weigh atoms
Cancer Applications:
http://nano.cancer.gov/learn/understanding/
Nanotechnology is
making circuits even
smaller allowing for
smaller electronic
devices
Nanomanufacturing
• Top Down
Approach
– Manufacture tools
that can help us
build tiny things
• Bottom-up Approach
– Control the molecular
arrangement of
atoms to build
structures