Revolution Evolution
At the nanoscale and with the aid of a scanning probe microscope, Teflon can be seen as a series of ropes. In this image, the team has unraveled the rope.
Imagining the world at the nanoscale can stretch the limits of the imagination. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter — far beyond what the naked eye can see. But the philosophy behind nanoscience, also called nanotechnology, is the stuff scientists’ and engineers’ dreams are made of — the ability to literally remake almost anything from the ground up. And while it has revolutionized dozens of products already and holds promise for improving many more, experts insist it’s not really about the revolution. It’s about the evolution.
At the beginning stage of nanoscience, what we would find at the nanoscale was almost anyone’s guess, says Nicholas Giordano, Hubert James Distinguished Professor of Physics. Then, in the 1980s, the scanning probe microscope was invented.
“It enabled you to look at things atom-by-atom in ways that were simply not possible before,” says Giordano, who has studied mesoscopic systems and nanoscience for 25 years. He and other researchers found that as matter shrunk, its properties changed — everything from how it conducted electricity to how it reflected light. By studying and measuring these changes, scientists might rearrange matter and its aggregates and improve the end result. Initially, electronics was the big beneficiary. “Your iPod, your computer, are both examples,” says Giordano.
A key differentiating factor is that instead of scaling down, as has been the past trend, nanoscience starts with the small and builds up. “What could you grow from the ground up into a complex structure? The most obvious answer is a human being,” says Ron Reifenberger, a physics professor whose work focuses on measuring atoms in various groups or clusters. And the possibilities are not contained within any field; nanoscience has seen chemists, biologists, physicists, and engineers working together on projects from the very beginning.
The possibilities of such collaborations may be endless. Today’s aircraft are lighter, thanks to nanoscience. So are tennis racquets. Stain-free pants and cell phones with brighter displays for gaming are both byproducts of nanoscience research. During the 1990s, advances in computer hard drive capacity were created when nanoscientists discovered that changes in magnetic resistance at the atomic level gave the drive’s read/write head the ability to process more information, which meant more data could be stored on the hard drive.