What Is Nano?

Over the past decade a new term has entered our vocabulary and that word is “nano.” We hear the word in movies. It’s mentioned on television and in newspapers and magazines. Futurists say it will pave the way for unimaginable new possibilities. Pessimists are unsure.

There are many different opinions about where this new field will take us, but everyone agrees that this science and the new technologies that come from it have the possibility of significantly impacting our world.

In microelectronics, energy technology and biomedicine, some of the most crucial technological needs of today are related to nanotechnology. We would like to have more compact high-capacity lightweight batteries, more efficient solar energy technologies, less expensive high-resolution flat panel displays and more efficient means to transport drug molecules to targeted cells. Solutions to these problems are likely to be based on methods that border on nanotechnology.

Nanotechnology describes the creation and utilisation of functional materials, devices and systems with novel functions and properties that are based either on geometrical size or on material-specific peculiarities of nano-structures. Purely geometrically the prefix "nano" (greek: dwarf) describes a scale 1000 times smaller than that of present elements of the micrometer-sphere (1nm corresponds to the millionth part of a mm). This scale has become accessible both by application of new physical instruments and procedures and by further diminution of present microsystems. Also structures of animated and non-animated nature were used as models for self-organising matter. Only if the mastery of this atomic and molecular dimension succeeds, the prerequisites for the optimisation of product properties within socioeconomic areas such as energy engineering, environmental technology as well as in information technology, health and ageing can be developed.

With the discovery of techniques to organise, characterise, and manipulate individual elements of matter as well as the increasing insights into self organisation principles of these elements the world-wide industrial conquest of nanoscale dimensions began. In the meantime the speed of innovation led to the situation that physical fundamentals are still being investigated while first product groups are already entering the world markets. Their sales impacts are caused by the implementation of nanoscale architecture with new macroscopic functions.