Overview of nanotechnology

Nanotechnology is highly interdisciplinary, involving physics, chemistry, biology, materials science, and the full range of the engineering disciplines. The word nanotechnology is widely used as shorthand to refer to both the science and the technology of this emerging field. Narrowly defined, nanoscience concerns a basic understanding of physical, chemical, and biological properties on atomic and near-atomic scales. Nanotechnology, narrowly defined, employs controlled manipulation of these properties to create materials and functional systems with unique capabilities.

In contrast to recent engineering efforts, nature developed “nanotechnologies” over billions of years, employing enzymes and catalysts to organize with exquisite precision different kinds of atoms and molecules into complex microscopic structures that make life possible. These natural products are built with great efficiency and have impressive capabilities, such as the power to harvest solar energy, to convert minerals and water into living cells, to store and process massive amounts of data using large arrays of nerve cells, and to replicate perfectly billions of bits of information stored in molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

There are two principal reasons for qualitative differences in material behaviour at the nanoscale (traditionally defined as less than 100 nanometres). First, quantum mechanical effects come into play at very small dimensions and lead to new physics and chemistry. Second, a defining feature at the nanoscale is the very large surface-to-volume ratio of these structures. This means that no atom is very far from a surface or interface, and the behaviour of atoms at these higher-energy sites have a significant influence on the properties of the material. For example, the reactivity of a metal catalyst particle generally increases appreciably as its size is reduced—macroscopic gold is chemically inert, whereas at nanoscales gold becomes extremely reactive and catalytic and even melts at a lower temperature. Thus, at nanoscale dimensions material properties depend on and change with size, as well as composition and structure.

Using the processes of nanotechnology, basic industrial production may veer dramatically from the course followed by steel plants and chemical factories of the past. Raw materials will come from the atoms of abundant elements—carbon, hydrogen, and silicon—and these will be manipulated into precise configurations to create nanostructured materials that exhibit exactly the right properties for each particular application. For example, carbon atoms can be bonded together in a number of different geometries to create variously a fibre, a tube, a molecular coating, or a wire, all with the superior strength-to-weight ratio of another carbon material—diamond. Additionally, such material processing need not require smokestacks, power-hungry industrial machinery, or intensive human labour. Instead, it may be accomplished either by “growing” new structures through some combination of chemical catalysts and synthetic enzymes or by building them through new techniques based on patterning and self-assembly of nanoscale materials into useful predetermined designs. Nanotechnology ultimately may allow people to fabricate almost any type of material or product allowable under the laws of physics and chemistry. While such possibilities seem remote, even approaching nature’s virtuosity in energy-efficient fabrication would be revolutionary.

Even more revolutionary would be the fabrication of nanoscale machines and devices for incorporation into micro- and macroscale systems. Once again, nature has led the way with the fabrication of both linear and rotary molecular motors. These biological machines carry out such tasks as muscle contraction (in organisms ranging from clams to humans) and shuttling little packets of material around within cells while being powered by the recyclable, energy-efficient fuel adenosine triphosphate. Scientists are only beginning to develop the tools to fabricate functioning systems at such small scales, with most advances based on electronic or magnetic information processing and storage systems. The energy-efficient, reconfigurable, and self-repairing aspects of biological systems are just becoming understood.

The potential impact of nanotechnology processes, machines, and products is expected to be far-reaching, affecting nearly every conceivable information technology, energy source, agricultural product, medical device, pharmaceutical, and material used in manufacturing. Meanwhile, the dimensions of electronic circuits on semiconductors continue to shrink, with minimum feature sizes now reaching the nanorealm, under 100 nanometres. Likewise, magnetic memory materials, which form the basis of hard disk drives, have achieved dramatically greater memory density as a result of nanoscale structuring to exploit new magnetic effects at nanodimensions. These latter two areas represent another major trend, the evolution of critical elements of microtechnology into the realm of nanotechnology to enhance performance. They are immense markets driven by the rapid advance of information technology.

Milestones in the development of nanotechnology

Visionaries

In a lecture in 1959 to the American Physical Society, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” American Nobelist Richard P. Feynman presented his audience with a vision of what could be done with extreme miniaturization. He began his lecture by noting that the Lord’s Prayer had been written on the head of a pin and asked,

Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica on the head of a pin? Let’s see what would be involved. The head of a pin is a sixteenth of an inch across. If you magnify it by 25,000 diameters, the area of the head of the pin is then equal to the area of all the pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Therefore, all it is necessary to do is to reduce in size all the writing in the Encyclopædia by 25,000 times. Is that possible? The resolving power of the eye is about 1/120 of an inch—that is roughly the diameter of one of the little dots on the fine half-tone reproductions in the Encyclopædia. This, when you demagnify it by 25,000 times, is still 80 angstroms in diameter—32 atoms across, in an ordinary metal. In other words, one of those dots still would contain in its area 1,000 atoms. So, each dot can easily be adjusted in size as required by the photoengraving, and there is no question that there is enough room on the head of a pin to put all of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Feynman was intrigued by biology and pointed out that

cells are very tiny, but they are very active; they manufacture various substances; they walk around; they wiggle; and they do all kinds of marvelous things—all on a very small scale. Also, they store information. Consider the possibility that we too can make a thing very small which does what we want—that we can manufacture an object that maneuvers at that level!

He also considered using big tools to make smaller tools that could make yet smaller tools, eventually obtaining nanoscale tools for directly manipulating atoms and molecules. In considering what all this might mean, Feynman declared,

I can hardly doubt that when we have some control of the arrangement of things on a small scale we will get an enormously greater range of possible properties that substances can have, and of different things that we can do.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to following these prophetic thoughts was simply the immediate lack of tools to manipulate and visualize matter at such a small scale. The availability of tools has always been an enabling aspect of the advance of all science and technology, and some of the key tools for nanotechnology are discussed in the next section, Pioneers.

Starting with a 1981 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and following with two popular books, Engines of Creation (1986) and Nanosystems (1992), American scientist K. Eric Drexler became one of the foremost advocates of nanotechnology. In fact, Drexler was the first person anywhere to receive a Ph.D. in molecular nanotechnology (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In his written works he takes a molecular view of the world and envisions molecular machines doing much of the work of the future. For example, he refers to “assemblers,” which will manipulate individual atoms to manufacture structures, and “replicators,” which will be able to make multiple copies of themselves in order to save time dealing with the billions of atoms needed to make objects of useful size. In an article for Encyclopædia Britannica’s 1990 Yearbook of Science and the Future, Drexler wrote:

Cells and tissues in the human body are built and maintained by molecular machinery, but sometimes that machinery proves inadequate: viruses multiply, cancer cells spread, or systems age and deteriorate. As one might expect, new molecular machines and computers of subcellular size could support the body’s own mechanisms. Devices containing nanocomputers interfaced to molecular sensors and effectors could serve as an augmented immune system, searching out and destroying viruses and cancer cells. Similar devices programmed as repair machines could enter living cells to edit out viral DNA sequences and repair molecular damage. Such machines would bring surgical control to the molecular level, opening broad new horizons in medicine.

Drexler’s futurist visions have stimulated much thought, but the assembler approach has failed to account for the strong influence of atomic and molecular forces (i.e., the chemistry) at such dimensions. The controversy surrounding these popularizations, and the potential dangers of entities such as intelligent replicators (however remote), have stimulated debate over the ethical and societal implications of nanotechnology.