Abstract

The essence of nanotechnology is the ability to work at the molecular level, atom by atom, to create large structures with fundamentally new molecular organization. Nanotechnology is concerned with materials and systems whose structures and components exhibit novel and significantly improved properties. These physical, chemical, and biological properties, processes and phenomena are novel due to their nanoscale size in the range of about 10-9 to 10-7 m (1,000 times smaller than the diameter of human hair). The aim is to exploit these properties by gaining control of structures and devices at atomic, molecular, and supra-molecular levels and to learn to efficiently manufacture and use these devices. New behavior at the nanoscale is not necessarily as predictable as observed at large size scales. The most important changes in behavior are caused not by the order of magnitude size reduction, but by newly observed phenomena intrinsic to the nanoscale, such as size confinement, predominance of interfacial phenomena and quantum mechanics.

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